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Comment by dessant | Hacker News Reader

Windows Defender is a performant alternative to all the junk antivirus companies put out. At this point it's fairly well documented that having a third-party antivirus product running on your Windows device often exposes you to security issues, even if the antivirus doesn't spy on you.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/ex-top-mozilla-dev-to-windows-...

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"Windows Defender is a performant alternative ..."

No it's not really [1]. You can check by yourself running `npm install` of any medium sized project or if you are a gamer, launch Steam with/out Defender.

Even IntelliJ warns you about Defender performance impact in the IDE.

[1] https://www.av-comparatives.org/tests/performance-test-octob...

How does Defender compare against other antivirus options? Perhaps it's the least bad? Obviously running more software will have a performance hit over not running software. Especially when it almost requires constantly inspecting the system.

From a performance impact standpoint, based on just one test suite, it is the worst on the market. https://www.av-comparatives.org/tests/performance-test-octob... (and I linked to the same article in your parents comment...)

Avira and Bitdefender manage to rank in the top tier of performance impact and protection every time I check. Both offer free products, and Bitdefender Free is considerably less annoying, in my past experiences. Free antivirus is actually one of the places where market competition forced a bunch of them to clean up their acts and offer a good non invasive product. Avira still has ads, but if you wanted one product on your pc and one on a home server, it might make sense to use two vendors products. https://www.bitdefender.com/solutions/free.html https://www.avira.com/en/free-antivirus-windows

For one off system scans, besides the two mentioned above; ESET, F-Secure, Kaspersky, Panda (and Emsisoft which has Avira and Bitdefender built in) all offer great spot check products. ADWCleaner is indispensable.

It's interesting that "anti-virus" has now become the free component in suites. You pay for things like VPN, password management, and home network security. Kaspersky goes a step further and offers VPN and password management in a free tier. https://usa.kaspersky.com/free-antivirus

Pretty hard to get people to pay for services Microsoft provides for free

The reason I no longer use Bitdefender is because they forced MITM httpS in the browser. It wasn't optional in free product and I don't know if it is in paid. Has that changed?

My understanding was that web attack prevention could be disabled, but then the program icon showed you as "unprotected." It wasnt so much forced MITM as misleading representation of your current state. If the user doesnt want web protection, dont keep scolding them for it.

AFAIK free version didn't allow any granularity to disable web protection.

For me the main advantage of Windows Defender is the business model. It's in Microsoft's best interest to keep Windows virus-free as much as possible. It's in commercial anti-virus vendors interest to keep machines as virus ridden as possible.

I've got Symantec endpoint protection on my work laptop, using WSL and doing an npm install causes the laptop to Blue Screen everytime.

The bsod error indicates it's Symantec.

My solution is that it seems to be because it's creating so many files so quickly, so I made a power profile that sets the max cpu frequency as 5%, it takes longer but doesn't break the computer.

In comparison windows defender is slow but works. Haha.

I have the same problem. Makes WSL completely unusable for all practical purposes. Might try your mitigation, but it feels a bit like cutting off a leg to get out of a bear trap.

Not so much the Steam users, but I would hope that developers would have enough knowledge to add their project and build directories to the anti-virus on-scan exclusions.

As with any security, it's a balance against convenience/speed.

If you're on your company-provided system you probably don't have the ability to change any anti-virus settings. Corporate IT admin rarely trust us to not just turn it off because it's annoying.

I can confirm that McAfee and Trend Micro do the same thing. McAfee even goes so far as to lock files in your AppData and Tmp folders until it's finished checking them. This causes havoc with a lot of apps and makes certain ones completely unusable.

Agreed, I have seen several workloads getting stalled by a single core being occupied by defender. They should make it async. If the file is not going to be executed, just written to disk, then there's no reason to stall the writing thread.

Windows Defender doesn't seem to do very well in AV tests

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE-xdb9hTqY

Avast! did much better

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=km4aKjA2T_c

"Avast! did much better"

You mean the company discussed in the article?

Yes. Their AV suite outperforms Microsoft's.

haven't had to install an anti-virus or deal with a virus in like forever. windows 10 kept nagging me about scanning, and often doesn't find much. i may not know what new tricks malwares and viruses are using right now.

"often doesn't find much"!?

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