What's the deal with Windows Defender?

Factual Questions
1

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?

Thanks.

2

Windows Defender is the new version of Microsoft Anti-spyware.

3

Defender is the official name for the final version of Microsoft Anti-Spy.

4

Well, not the final version, as Windows Defender is still a beta product.

5

Speaking of, has anyone got it to work? I’d rather much prefer the previous beta version (Anti-Spyware Beta).

6

Wait. There are popup windows asking you to download software that are actually legit?

7
      • 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…
        ~
8

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.

9

A bit of caution: No doubt there are scammers who do popups offering to install MS-Windows Defender but install their own “products” instead.

Don’t install anything offered by popups ever.*

If you want MS-Windows Defender, go directly to MS’s website and download it directly from there.

*I am amazed how many people there are that click on these things.

10

Windows Defender is not anti-virus software, so you’ll still need something else for that.

11

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.

12

the new version of defender seems to be having issues downloading updates from behind proxy servers, see if that applies to you.

13

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.

14

Thanks, I had stopped using those. I’ll start using them again.