Microsoft Defender – the old Windows Defender – is the antivirus tool that is included in Windows 10. Nothing wrong with having a free option. The downside comes when Microsoft decides to force you to use something you want or don’t want, which is precisely what it just did with Defender.
And, although the current version of Microsoft Defender does a good job protecting your PC from viruses, malware and other attacks, there are plenty of reasons why we would like to disable it.
The most obvious is that you may want to use another tool antivirus with more advanced functions. If so, there is no reason to have Microsoft Defender active and consuming system resources, affecting the performance of your PC.
The reality is that it has always been difficult to deactivate Microsoft Defender in Windows 10, but at least you could put its continuous protection mode on pause so that it did not use CPU time or battery (even if it was later activated again automatically).
However, there was a way to totally disable it by editing the Windows 10 registry – until now. The new Windows 10 August 2020 update (version 4.18.2007.8) has deleted the registry entry and has been “abandoned and will be ignored” from the moment that update is installed, according to Microsoft itself.
Through noses
It’s true that Microsoft has done a good job turning Defender into a useful antivirus tool that you want to use. And it’s also true – and obvious – that there are plenty of reasons why Microsoft doesn’t want it to be easy to disable. You want Windows 10 PCs to be safe and also prevent malicious code from spreading over the internet. But maybe forcing yourself to use Defender whether you want to or not is the wrong solution.
The correct way is that the moment you install and activate another antivirus tool, Microsoft Defender is automatically deactivated. And the moment the other tool is deactivated, Defender is activated again. The technical difficulty to do this is nil.
But forcing you to use their software, be it Defender or OneDrive, because yes, because Microsoft wants to control your PC as much as possible, it smells a lot of its old monopolistic practices that the American government and the European Union already punished just two decades ago. And, at the very least, it is a real nuisance for the end user who wants to have maximum control over its machine.
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