[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...