Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mattlondon | Hacker News Reader

I've felt like AV software is often worse than the viruses: intrusive, slow, ineffective, getting in the way, and not once detecting anything.

Pretty much all of my "family tech support" is related to the AV doing something stupid like auto-deleting cookies or flashing up big scary messages for something trivial.

However Windows Defender seems to be good for me on Win10 - it just sits there out of the way, I don't even know its running. I LIKE the fact it doesn't have "online protection" or password managers or parental controls or whatever. It feels lightweight and does not cause everything to become 3x or 4x (or worse!) slower like every other AV software I've encountered

Whenever I go to perform family tech support I remove any random AV software they've been tricked into installing and just leave Windows Defender and that usually solves the issues (obviously making sure they are up-to-date on patches & still using 2FA)

Agree, most AV's get in the way of doing their job and are intrusive. As a developer we from time to time have problems with false positives or clashes with some AV's, so the customer gets annoyed and we have to contact the AV to get the false positive removed. Most seem to have a lot of bloat, but in the end get in the way.

I just wanna point out Windows Defender DOES have online protection, and it's gotten in my way pretty frequently. Whenever a new steam game is released it interferes with the download (goes from nearly a Gb/s to zero) while it scans the files being downloaded. And then when you start the game up loading times are in the 10 minute+ range because it's analyzing the binary.

You can disable these features though by turning off real time protection (which I had to do).

Although i agree with most of what you said, Windows Defender is not as lightweight as you think it is.

https://www.av-comparatives.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/a...

It certainly feels lightweight though and that is the important metric.

Some might argue it's the only real metric that matters for user perception. That said, if it's hitting your battery that will be hard for user to perceive.

The only AV I have love for is MBAM, not the real-time protection but the plain old system scan.

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