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Do I Need An Antivirus Since I Have Windows Defender?


tlcmd

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Advice, please.

My HP laptop came with Windows 8 installed which I upgraded to 8.1. It also came with Norton Antivirus and that program has expired and been removed. It also came with Microsoft Defender. When I tried to install Microsoft Security Essentials, I received a notification that I did not need to install Microsoft Security Essentials since Microsoft Defender provided the same protection.

MY QUESTION: Do I need to install an antiviral program since I have Windows Defender? If so, which is the preferred one.

Thanks,

tlcmd

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Considering how much MSE/Defender slows your PC down and how its detection rates are, yes, you do need an antivirus. Defender is only a basic layer of protection. It's low on false positives, but that's mostly because it lets things pass that aren't really safe.

You can look at something like av-comparatives to check out how other AVs perform. They usually set defender as baseline, and performance is one of the worst. There are also detection tests on that site and others.

Personally, after switching around a lot, I ended up with avast. Streaming updates and a Web Shield (which they recently fixed) is pretty rare in a free antivirus. You have to register it, but it's free and you don't get bombarded with spam mail.

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I also like Avast!.

They went through a bad time with a bum update a month or two ago and lost a lot of respect, but that's all been fixed and now it's a really good free product that's not only thorough but quite efficient.

I paid a lot for a high-end machine with a high-end I/O subsystem, because it means I can do more engineering work. I timed Microsoft's out-of-box solution vs. Avast's. Avast allows the OS get quite a lot (like 25%) more data to/from the disk in the same amount of time. That means a smoother operating system that lets you get more done.

Many applications say "disable your antivirus/anti-malware solution before installing". I have NEVER had to do that with Avast.

Be aware that there's a lot you can configure, and there are a lot of optional features you don't actually have to install for it to still be useful. For example, I use all the "shields" (web, eMail, and file system), but the only optional Tool I use is the one that checks a lot of installed apps and tells you whether there are updates. This means I can turn off the self-updaters in all the many applications themselves, for a net savings.

-Noel

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I don't know how AVG has developed, but back when I used it, it used to slow down your PC quite a lot. More annoying though were the false positives. Also, automatic updates != automatic updates. The frequency is very important. For example, ZoneAlarm Free has automatic updates and uses the kaspersky detection engine. But it only gets updates every 24h! That's a serious threat in my book, which offsets the good detection engine. Other free AVs similarly cut their efficiency.

Avast has something they call "streaming updates", which means the updates are pushed to the user once they are ready, so you don't have a set update interval - if there are updates, you will get them. If there aren't, you (or rather the program) don't even have to check. From what I know, Kaspersky uses a similar system - but it's payware.

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The most impact I saw was with network transfers: start copying anything over network -> MSE chokes network transfer from ~70MB/s to 5MB/s, hogging ~90% CPU on a weaker system. 70MB/s to ~30MB/s on a more powerful system. Disabling active monitoring brings me back to my "full" gigabit speeds.

There is less impact, but still noticeable when copying a large amount of files from the HDD to an external storage, there is constant scanning that slows down transfers.

Another thing is that downloading files with chrome makes them stall for half a minute after completion because MSE is scanning it.

I see none of those issues with either MSE disabled or avast installed. The performance tests on av-comparatives confirm this - MSE is slow.

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The scenarios I described happen equally on win8 and win7. And 1s delay on icon load? Try a bigger folder with a lot of executables... i.e. your download folder. After a certain exe count, opening it results in explorer hanging for minutes on a quadcore machine. Especially so if you sort by date modified.

A reason why this happens is because MSE/defender scans all files every time instead of using a transient cache - if the antivirus already scanned that file and didn't find anything, it won't scan them on open until definition updates are available - it wouldn't be able to find anything anyway.

Edited by Soukyuu
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I really don't have a folder with a lot of EXEs in them. I organize everything I download. So as a test I just went to the System32 folder and MsMpEng.exe went up to 50MB. It idles at 36MB. So I can say I've never had a problem with MSSE at all and not seen any sort of performance impacts. (This is on Windows 7 not 8 so I'm off topic here)

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An historical reference:
The Case of My Mom’s Broken Microsoft Security Essentials Installation

http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2012/01/05/3473797.aspx

I suspected that whatever I’d run into was rare enough that customer support wouldn’t be able to help (and what would they say if they knew Mark Russinovich was calling for tech support?), especially when I found no help on the web for error code 0x80070643.

:lol:

jaclaz

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