I have talked in the past about Microsoft Security Essentials being installable on Windows XP 64-bit and Windows Server 2008 R2 despite being “against the Terms of Service” as ballyhooed by the arrogantly myopic Microsoft Forums.

Well, despite the fact that version 3.0 was a no-show, version 4.0 was released on 2012-04-24 and guess what — nothing has changed. I didn’t even know that MSE v4.0 was released until late that month, and I found them already installed on my Windows XP 64-bit…

…and Windows Server 2008 R2 machines…

…via the auto update functionality.

In fact, It even works on Windows Server 2003 R2…

…which was an unexpected surprise. I recently set this unit up as a workstation running server software, because I had the unusual situation of having a motherboard that could only take 32-bit processors, but which could take up to 12Gb of PC3200 ECC REG memory. Since any normal 32-bit desktop version of Windows runs into the 4Gb memory barrier (showing and using at most 3.5-3.7Gb of memory), I was forced to go with Server 2003 R2 Enterprise; the only 32-bit version of Windows that can access up to 12Gb of memory.

I am curious if MSEv4 will install on fresh copies of these systems (as what I have are auto-updated from v2), but I don’t have the time right now to answer that. The question I will be looking into over the next few days, however, is if MSEv4 is now installable on Windows for Legacy PC’s, which was able to take version 1 but became persona non grata with version 2. Hopefully I will have some good news to report.