Do I Need An Antivirus Since I Have Windows Defender?

[MagicAndre1981]

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.

yeah, this is what I see since the first MSE version and MS ignores this completely (As always)

[Tripredacus]

I've dealt with MSSE team on one occasion and I agree they seem to have their own priorities that don't seem to match up with anyone else's.

especially when I found no help on the web for error code 0x80070643.

jaclaz

Even our pals at Microsoft now are encouraging people to just "look it up" in Windows 8. And it isn't very helpful!

[tlcmd]

Thanks to everyone who replied to my questions regarding MSE and Microsoft Defender. I appreciate your input and have taken all of it under advisement.

tlcmd (AKA Dick)

[Soukyuu]

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)

If you always have MSE installed, how do you know if there are any performance impacts?

To be honest, it doesn't even have to be executables, I had folders hanging by simply browsing them over network, or by opening a vacation photo folder.

[Ex_Brit]

MSE wont install on 8.8.1 for a good reason. Windows Defender perhaps should have been called something else on this operating system as, in these OS's only, it contains an antivirus and it's unwise to run more than one antivirus at the same time.

It's a personal choice. Installing a 3rd party antivirus or security suite will disable it anyway.

Personally I don't trust either WD or Windows Firewall so use 3rd party software.

[helpdesk98]

It is definitely not the best software I have ever used, but it helps a bit in my case. I work on peoples PCs and they usually have a lack of anti-virus software, expired trials, or stolen protection(that just has bed written all over it). I install it after I clean up their computer then I give them a list of free/paid programs to consider.