  The nature of the several microlensing events observed by the MACHO team
towards the LMC still remains controversial. Low-mass substellar objects and
stars with masses larger than ~1 M_{sun} have been ruled out as major
components of a MACHO galactic halo, while stars of half solar masses are the
most probable candidates. In this paper we assess jointly the relative
contributions of both red dwarfs and white dwarfs to the mass budget of the
galactic halo. In doing so we use a Monte Carlo simulator which incorporates
up-to-date evolutionary sequences of both red dwarfs and white dwarfs as well
as detailed descriptions of our Galaxy and of the LMC. We explore the complete
mass range between 0.08 and 1 M_{sun} as possible microlensing candidates and
we compare the synthetic populations obtained with our simulator with the
results obtained by the MACHO and EROS experiments. Our results indicate that,
despite that the contribution of the red dwarf population increases by a factor
of 2 the value of the optical depth obtained when taking into account the white
dwarf population alone, it is still insufficient to explain the number of
events claimed by the MACHO team. Finally, we find that the contribution to the
halo dark matter of the whole population under study is smaller than 10% at the
95% conficence level.
