Updating Microsoft Security Essentials without Using Windows Update [Tips]

Microsoft Security Essentials is the latest anti-virus and anti-spyware software developed by Microsoft. It’s a pretty good and reliable product that has been adopted widely by the community since released. If you are one of those who have chosen MSE as your primary anti-virus software, congratulation, welcome on board with us who have Stopped Paying For Windows Security.

One of the crucial things being as an anti-virus software is that it needs to be updated constantly. Failing to do so may cause serious security problem to your beloved Windows 7 system. Because MSE is developed by Microsoft, its update process is included in the routine Windows Updates. So normally if your Windows Update setting has been configured properly and has been working fine you don’t need to worry about this update process.

However, there are circumstances that Windows Update doesn’t always work the way it supposes to. Or simply you have disabled it because you hate it. And that’s why MSE also includes a command utility named MpCmdRun.exe to help you overcome the update problem.

The utility is part of the MSE program so you can easily find it from the following folder.

%programfiles%\Microsoft Security Essentials

The utilities also allows you perform all of the operations of MSE from the command line, including the update process. And because of that, you can easily add this utility with proper parameters into the Task Scheduler to let it run independently without Windows Update or MSE itself involved.

For example,

mpcmdrun -SignatureUpdate is to update MSE

mpcmdrun -scan 0 is to start the default scanning process

Guys at AddictiveTips even went one step further and has made one simple utility called MSE Update Utility that helps you simplify the update process with time scheduler built-in. Nice work.