I’m not a techie. A few days ago I got a pop-up window asking me to download Windows Defender. Never saw it before. I downloaded it and have run it a few times. Nothing to report yet.
Now can someone tell me what this thing is? And what if anything does it replace? Do I still need Norton anti-virus or Microsoft anti-spyware?
If it came on “a popup”, that should have ONLY been a usual Windows Automatic Updates popup. Anything else means that you , , , um, , , , downloaded and installed something else…
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Maybe I should have made that more clear; no doubt this is a legit Microsoft product.
It sounds like I can get rid of the other anti-spyware, but what about anti-virus software? I was thinking from the wording that the intent is to deal with viruses also.
I’ve noticed the current version of Windows Defender doesn’t seem to work properly: it doesn’t download definitions. That’s probably a temporary problem, but I’d wait a few weeks before downloading it.
I would not dump you other anti-spyware just yet. I have not downloaded Defender just yet, but I have been running MS Anti-spyware for about 6 months now. It is set to scan every night. It has found a grand total of 1 piece of spyware on my system. Yet several times I have had my system slow down to a crawl, and when I scan with Ad-aware and Spybot they find things that MS doesn’t. Every single time.
IMHO it still needs some work.