Windows Defender or 3rd party?

lolnothankyou said:

If you don't need a real-time protection (I haven't seen a virus in like 10 years), you can disable Windows Defender and download Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool instead. KVRT is free, easy to use, standalone and somewhat efficient. Just block it with your firewall so it doesn't call home (or worse).

I would stay away from any Avast products.

Just review if you are content to use Russian sourced software.

Test antivirus software for Windows 10 - June 2018 | AV-TEST

During May and June 2018 we continuously evaluated 18 home user security products using their default settings. We always used the most current publicly-available version of all products for the testing. They were allowed to update themselves at any time and query their in-the-cloud services. We focused on realistic test scenarios and challenged the products against real-world threats. Products had to demonstrate their capabilities using all components and protection layers.

Defender got a 'top product' award this time round...

Infrasonic said:

Test antivirus software for Windows 10 - June 2018 | AV-TEST


Defender got a 'top product' award this time round...

Good to know. It's a no brainer not to use Defender unless you need the bells and whistles of other products.

Although I love WD, as a gamer, I have found out that sometimes, and randomly, WD Disk I/O performance is abysmal. YMMV.
So for now I am using AVAST free with just one and second shields (and game mode). The overall experience is A LOT BETTER. I am sorry for WD, because it's a good product but it needs polishing.

PS - To OP. If you want to try any third-party AV I strongly advise you TO MAKE A BACKUP COPY of your relevant partitions (system, data, etc) to be on the safe side. Use Macrium Reflect Free or similar. Don't rely on System Restore if you want to go back and forth installing/uninstalling AV packages.

Hi folks
This is like BMW vs Mercedes or those type of arguments.

Personally as W10 is a continuously evolving platform I'd suspect that Ms know the inside of their OS before any 3rd party supplier - especially where it comes to HOME platforms -- for Corporates Ms probably works with those especially where service maintenance contracts are involved.

So I'd go in this case for the Ms product especially for home / individual users - although for some applications 3rd party products can be really good.

What I wouldn't do though is run more than 1 piece of A/V software concurrently.

Incidentally decent Virus free backups and using computer intelligently are probably even more important than A/V systems these days -- infecting zillions of computers is so "Last Century" -- the name of the game is making Money which A/V software can't really protect you against. Just don't ever give out too many details on web - especially sites like Instagram / face book etc , don't store bank details / passwords on cloud, don't open or even accept emails from unknown sources, beware "look alike websites" and never open any suspicious attachment or files.

Cheers
jimbo

Could it be Defender acting slower later since they added Onedrive ransomware protection option to it as long as have Office 365 Home, or Business edition, was a mention of that in Avast forum recently on a topic I noticed, so maybe that is why its acting much slower than it used to be lol.

Laptop still has it active, Desktop currently on Avast Free, Clean install of laptop doing tomorrow, so much to backup and find drives with room to back it all up lol

Interesting comments on the various 3rd party tools. I haven't seen ANYTHING that tells me I can exclude specific software, partitions and/or folders from having WD touch them. If I can make these exclusions, can someone tell me how?

Again, for me, this is a test. I don't dislike WD. I'm being told to shut it down to see if that's what's causing the Adobe software to stink. HOPEFULLY, this weekend things will be reasonably quiet and I'll get a few hours to try it.

At the moment it looks like I'll be disconnecting from the Internet, then shutting down the firewall and real-time protection. Since I can't see a way to stop them, I believe there will be several WD services out there still running but hopefully doing nothing.

If Adobe doesn't experience the same slowdowns when WD is "shut down", I"ll have to look at something else.

But there is too much autopilot for BD Free and little options to toggle if you are a power user. What happens when you need to exclude something or BD pulls out some false positives?. Other than that BD Free detection rate is superb and it's a very capable AV. System performance impact is quite tiny too, almost negligible.

PS - Let's not forget the newer Panda Dome Free. It's also quite good.