[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Good. Antivirus software that insists on running in the background is horrible and largely unnecessary.

A very significant portion of my family tech support has been about Windows Defender grinding systems to a half by keeping disk IO constantly at 100% in laptops with HDDs.

[davoneus]

Amen. People are amazed when I fire up SysInternals 'ProcMon' and show them how many hundreds of thousands of times their AV fires off in one single minute of monitoring. ()

I'll grant that kind of sustained checking is what you need to combat malware on Windows. But it damn well does have an effect on the overall system responsiveness.

() I did a q-n-d check; 1.3M events, and almost 300K were AV/Malware.

[Night_Thastus]

For casual users, modern implementation of Windows Defender has been pretty great. It has low overhead, doesn't tend to get in the way and does a good job of catching what is legitimately dangerous. It's not perfect, but for most people it's a great addon to common sense.

If it's grinding the system to a halt, there's something else already quite wrong.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

Nothing except that the system has an HDD and not an SSD.

I've seen this numerous times with fresh Win 10 installs on hardware I had just serviced.

Just a couple of weeks ago I resolved this situation for my brother who has a fairly old desktop with a 6th gen i5 and a hard drive. The system was completely unusable because windows 10 had so much crap running in the backround polling the disk, keeping all his software waiting. Disk was completely healthy. Did a full reinstall, barely improved. Installed an SSD, and it was like new.

[pie_flavor]

It's unnecessary for users smart enough not to get viruses. Pretty necessary for users that aren't.

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

It's not rocket science. My mother is pretty tech illiterate but she's never gotten any viruses after I hosed the Win Defender off her laptop. She literally just checks her mail, streams netflix and visits a handful of news websites. Lots of users are like this. They can get by fine just with an adblocker and an occasional scan to be sure. Scanning the disk constantly is just ridiculous.

[tpush]

> [...] she's never gotten any viruses after I hosed the Win Defender off her laptop.

How would you (or she!) know that?

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

I do a basic service when I visit, including a malware scan.

[SleepyMyroslav]

anecdote to the contrary:

>visits a handful of news websites

That's exactly how I got my only zero day virus in 20+ years of tech career. News sites have sources. Some news are rumors. It was very long ago and i pressed source link to 'semi accurate' tech news source in a news about CPUs.

Your best bet is to replace hdd with ssd or replace laptop and turn everything to 'recommended' or even 'security recommended'. Yes 8ms delays on some file opens will be there but people can live with that.

[orangepurple]

HN readers can delete Windows antivirus and reduce global warming. It's your civic duty.

[nikanj]

I would bet good money that people using an xtreme tuning OS like Atlas, are more likely to get their games from the pirate bay and their hacks from honest-bobs-totally-not-virii.com

[mtlmtlmtlmtl]

For me, Atlas was just a way of installing my gaming windows install a little faster, because I didn't have to spend hours removing or disabling all the shitware, spyware etc. I was gonna do that anyway. I think it's just as likely that people using Atlas are just Linux/Mac daily drivers who consequently have a much lower tolerance for Windows' builtin malware, and so take efforts to make the little time they spend in Windows more bearable.