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Comment by jve | Hacker News Reader

> The following weeks and months seemed to offer little excitement – the Kaspersky software worked essentially as well or as badly as Windows Defender.

Well, since Microsoft offered free AV and then bundled with Windows, I'v never looked back and felt kind of relieved I don't have to install 3rd party AV. Defender just doesn't get in the way.

I trust Microsoft to do the right thing more than other AV vendors that put Value substracted features: ads, disturbing, user-hostile notifications, performance degrading bling-bling (toolbars...) etc.

If I really want to check some file, i'll let VirusTotal.com scan it via every AV product they are aware of.

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I used to swear by BitDefender Free as it was incredibly lightweight and offered good protection according to reviews. And then they dropped the “feature” on me and installed their own certificate to scan SSL traffic with absolutely no prior warning. I just realized it when sites with self-signed certs suddenly looked good because of the BitDefender CA certificate was in the middle.

I stopped taking any software’s reputation for granted.

The problem I have with the Microsoft bundled AV is that it's really slow and seems single threaded. I had to add most of my project directories as exceptions because building projects took 4-5 times longer when the AV was enabled for those files.

This is my main gripe with it aswell, got a fast nvme ssd and yet everything slows down to a crawl since the av needs to seemingly triple check files every time they're accessed

My biggest gripe is how hard they deliberately make it to disable. Amd even when I finally can, whatever settings I used may well have changed when MS updates. And when they do update, it gets re-enabled.

One of many instances where MS takes the "I know best" approach. You want to write a good anti-malware program, try not behaving like malware.

It disables itself when you install another AV.

The reason they make it hard to remove is (1) otherwise malware could easily disable it and (2) must people should not be trusted with such decision anyway.

Also, have you ever tried to remove Norton AV??

Joke is, Symantec Endpoint Protection is actually incredibly easy to deal with.

The consumer AV (Norton)? Hah, the thing is meant to trick/convince/harass you to keep paying up and make it difficult.

Norton sucks and is pretty much objectively malware, but there's one key difference: because win defender is bundled with my OS (and the security updates I have to install, it can change itself, re-enable itself, etc. Malware can still disable it with admin, they just make it hard for a user with admin. The operating system can only do so much to save a user from himself. Maybe some sort of developer mode, a la android?

The thing is, they do know best for the vast majority of their users, at least when it comes to updates and AV.

I don't believe it's single threaded - I recently upgrade to a i9-9900k, and as one does when one has a new PC, I've been watching my CPU usage and heat - for the first bit Windows Defender seems to be single threaded, but after a time it kicks into high gear, pins all my cores, and my machine turns into a space heater.

Still surprised there isn't an open source AV and Firewall combo for Windows that competes heavily, and still can offer a pro version for people who want to support the project.

Haha. It's a really naive attitude. The moment you have to deal with "average users" posting support issues as they'll be drawn to flies to your "free AV". You'll be either wanting to (a) kill yourself (b) charge everyone and remove the free download

C) don't guarantee support and let a community handle it

like spybot does it, but they are not opensource. ClamavNet is, but I never tried them.

That kind of product usually involves millions of dollars to create and support, and you're competing against very large entrenched players, so there's not much point unless you just like starting companies.

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