Microsoft Security Essentials is the free antivirus
developed and provided by Microsoft for free to Windows XP, Vista and 7 users.
It has been very good detection against virus and it is light which does not
put a lot of load on your computer. However to install Microsoft Security
Essentials, the user must go through the genuine validation check first. If the
genuine validation passes, the installation continues but if failed, the user
cannot proceed with the installation showing the message “This copy of Windows
did not pass genuine validation. You might be a victim of software
counterfeiting” and will be either asked to close the setup or get a genuine
Windows.
If you do not have Windows Genuine Advantage (WGA) installed
because you want privacy and does not trust what information is being constantly
sent to Microsoft, then here is a method on how to install Microsoft Security
Essentials bypassing the genuine validation check.
1. Download Microsoft Security Essentials.
2. Right click on mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe, go to
7-Zip and click Extract to “mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe\”
3. Download MSSE Genuine Check Bypass Loader, extract and
copy the loader.exe file to the mssefullinstall-x86fre-en-us-xp.exe folder.
4. Run loader.exe and Microsoft Security Essentials setup
will launch. Follow the on-screen instructions and when asked validate your
Windows, just continue with it. Within a few seconds you will get a message
“This copy of Windows passed genuine validation”.
You can now update and use Microsoft Security Essentials as
normal. However you will notice that there are some red alert notifications in
the program telling you that Windows did not pass genuine validation and you
can run another validation check after you get genuine Windows.
This annoying message can be removed by following the steps
below.
1. Press WIN+R, type %WINDIR%\system32\drivers\etc and click
OK.
2. Open hosts file with a text editor, add the following
entries to the file and save it.
127.0.1.1 spynettest.microsoft.com
127.0.1.1 spynet2.microsoft.com
127.0.1.1 mpa.one.microsoft.com
3. Press WIN+R, type "%ALLUSERSPROFILE%\Application
Data\Windows Genuine Advantage\Data" (with quotes) and click OK. Delete
the data.dat file in the data folder.
The method above only works on Windows XP. We have tried it
on Windows 7 and got the error message “Unable to change access to memory
region!” when trying to run the loader.exe. Unfortunately every running
loader.exe with Windows XP SP3 compatibility mode also won’t work.