[xnorswap]

If the first thing someone does is find a way to remove Windows Defender, I'm going to assume they're too clever for their own good.

Windows defender is one of the best things Microsoft did for Windows. Prior to defender, the array of vendor AV solutions was a complete shit-show. Even previously useful options got bought out by the major players and stuffed full of crap-ware.

[maccard]

I agree windows defender was an absolute game changer, but have you used it in Win11? I upgraded a fairly beefy workstation from win10 to win11 and immediately started to see 10-15x slowdowns on the first run of a task after boot. Things that took 20 seconds were taking 3-4 minutes. I took an etl trace and discovered it was windows defender. Subsequent runs were about 20% worse than on win10.

Adding the folder to the excluded folders didn’t work, nor did adding the compiler to the excluded process list. I ended up disabling windows defender for a while and now I’m using a dev drive which is slower than no-defender but quicker than second run with defender.

[xnorswap]

Windows 11 is horribly slow at everything it does. It's borderline unusable. Just hitting the windows key and typing "notepad" and hitting enter has gone from something that was near instant in windows XP to something that takes 30 seconds and only sometimes might be successful. I'm assuming it's waiting for network requests to send off what I'm typing to bing/cortana/etc before giving me the result I want.

Yes it could also be trying to then virus-check all the data it's sending and receiving without my informed consent.

I'm not trying to say windows 11 is good, just that it's an odd thing to first remove the one product that is still better than the alternatives. Because as horrible as defender is, have you experienced commercial AV products?

[maccard]

> Just hitting the windows key and typing "notepad" and hitting enter has gone from something that was near instant in windows XP to something that takes 30 seconds and only sometimes might be successful

Agreed. It's also surprisingly easy to fix - disable web search in the start menu. [0]

> Because as horrible as defender is, have you experienced commercial AV products?

yes, and they're a disgrace. I don't normally engage in baiting on here, but honestly a lot of them are worse than the viruses they protect you from. McAfee and Norton are _literally_ spyware.

At $PREV_JOB carbon black was installed over the weekend, and I was working on some performance related tasks. All my results were invalidated because of the slowdown it imparted on _everything_.

That doesn't give defender a free pass for falling from grace though.

[0] https://weblog.west-wind.com/posts/2024/May/03/Speed-up-your...

[animuchan]

I also think Defender is the best AV solution. At the same time, it's a completely useless software, so there's no reason to leave it running. You both can be right. :)

[beastman82]

Installing Norton a couple years ago was the worst software experience I've had. Still shudder when I think of it

[netsharc]

But WinDefender lies... it can claim to be off, but some parts are still active.

I use a Remote Desktop hack to allow more than one user to be logged in at the same time (e.g. 1 on the physical terminal and 1 over RDP, officially if someone tries to RDP in, the physical user needs to log out), of course it's a hack, and WinDefender classifies this as a malware RAT. Why yes it is a remote access tool, and it's your own, why should it be blocked?

Anyway on Win10, virus and threat protection could be described as off, but clicking "manage settings", there are more toggles, some of them are on, despite the summary saying "it's off". I just looked, a thing called "Real-time protection" has the description "You can turn off this setting for a short time before it turns back on automatically.".

It's definitely not your computer... yeah yeah yeah it's for noobs, and I can probably ask ChatGPT what registry setting I need to tweak to actually turn it off. But all these lies and user hostility!

[davidmurdoch]

And their method of removing it is by deleting folders?! Even though they definitely know Windows is not like Linux where "everything is a file". I'm actually surprised it booted.

Other that that, I thought it was a great criticism of Windows 11.

[AlexandrB]

> And their method of removing it is by deleting folders?!

I suspect this is the only way to actually get it to stop running. See some of the sibling comments here about how it re-enables itself. Maybe if you had the enterprise version of Windows you could do something else.

[varispeed]

So true. Every commercial anti-virus software I tried has let me down. From letting viruses in, to damaging the system by itself and causing loss of data. It's like anti-virus software were viruses themselves.

After being burned so many times I just stick to Defender and never had a single issue since (touch wood).

[dizhn]

It might be better than 3rd party solutions but what if the person wants no AV software at all?

[Dalewyn]

Windows Defender is so good that Microsoft Security Essentials was renowned as the worst anti-virus by anti-virus reviewers and providers.

You know something is awesome when the putrid market wails like a banshee.