[w4rh4wk5]

Personally, I am not a fan of Windows Defender in general, but disabling it completely renders other services (e.g. Windows Store) unusable. That's why I only disable the real-time scanning component.

There are two reasons for doing this:

Firstly, it has been shown that the real-time scanning features causes issues with file access latency. It's apparently quite noticeable when using WSL. On a laptop there might also be a noticeable improvement in battery life, but I don't have any data to back that up.

Secondly, every now and then the real-time scanning triggers on some file, removing/quarantining it without asking me first. This often happens, for instance, for video game cracks that I'd like to analyze / revers-engineer [^1]. So, for me, it's a lot of false positives and so far I haven't encountered a single case where Windows Defender actually protected me from something. At least that I know of.

^1: It's a hobby, I don't build DRM, don't worry. The games I work on typically release DRM-free.