I downloaded Microsoft Security Essentials help (laptop, sounds, installed, Windows Vista)

[Hypnosis]

Now that I downloaded this program advised by another poster, there are questions that need answers. I bought new laptop and it came with Windows Vista 7 and Norton and Mcafee and I was told to remove them, all I did was go to control panel and uninstall the programs there. Then someone told me that in order to check if they are still there to go to run and type msconfig and services.msc, results for msconfig, it says Services (Local) but I did not find either antivirus programs, I did find Norton Online Backup, but that's not even antivirus and it requires me to register or activate it in order to use it, which i didn't. I didn't see the antiviruses on services.msc.

Question 1:

Does this mean that I successfully deleted these antiviruses and if I did then why was it easy while other people say it's hard? Is there another way to see if I still have those antivirus programs installed?

Something that I notice different is that when I went on yahoo messenger now that I have Microsoft Essentials Security, it say something about Windows Firewall and gave me an option to unblock or block it,

Question 2: Why does it do this now? Windows Firewall is on for both public and private network, so if it was on before then why didn't it do this before? I am only assuming that it was on before, I did not check if it was.

Windows Defender- protection against spyware and potentially unwanted software, I checked the status of it and it says " This program is turned off" click here to turn it on, I click to turn on and it looks like it's loading but nothing ever happens. Virus protection and Spyware and unwanted software protection are both on and Microsoft Security Essentials is listed below them, but when I click on view installed antispyware programs and look at the status of Microsoft Security Essentials-- it's on but Windows Defender is OFF. I just clicked Turn on and the status changes keeps changing from On to Off by itself. And in the end I get a message from Windows Defender that says " This operation returned because the timeout period expired. (Error Code: 0x800705b4)

Question 3: Why is Windows Defender turned off now and how can I turn it on?

[EscapeCalifornia]

1) It sounds like they've been removed. People say they're difficult to remove because the uninstallers often don't do their job and it can be a pain to remove them. In your case, the uninstall was successful and while I'm sure there's still scraps left, its not enough to interfere with your computer.

2) Windows has a firewall built in but if you have a 3rd party firewall (like the one in Norton Internet Security) it will disable the Windows firewall. Now that Norton is gone, the Windows firewall is active again. The prompt you're seeing happens when a program tries to open a listening port. In this case, this is the first time Windows firewall has been active when Yahoo Messenger attempted to open a listening port, so its asking you if its OK. Answer yes if you know what program is asking. If you have a router, it won't really matter since the router blocks all incoming requests anyway.

Microsoft Security Essentials supersedes Windows Defender so it disables it. I've never seen Windows Defender do anybody any good anyway so there's no loss to having it disabled anyway.