Forum Discussion

Community Manager

Jul 19, 2017

A good primer on Windows Defender AV

Windows Defender Antivirus (Windows Defender AV) is an antimalware solution built into Windows 10. The Microsoft Malware Protection Center recently published a blog post that summarizes how the Windo...

Amitai Rottem

Former Employee

Jul 31, 2017

Hi!

I'm Amitai, a PM on the product team.

I just wanted to reach out and say thanks for the feedback! We hear it and will try to improve on that :-)

As for the temporary shutdown - not that I would usually recommend it - but if you feel you need to turn off "Real time protection" for just a few hours, you can slide it to "off" - we'll automatically turn it back off after a few hours of "snooze".

Amitai

Douglas Bowker

Copper Contributor

Jul 31, 2017

Amitai:

Thanks and that's a really good tip about the real-time protection slider.

So to add some additional perspective, the reason why AV can interfere with my work would be best illustrated with the following example. I recognize my situation is certainly out of the ordinary, but again, if there is flexibility built in to the OS, I can see others benefiting too.

If I am generating an animation, that could mean anywhere between 600-1200 new files be created either via alocal network of rendering servers, or it may also be a remote rendering service. In the case of local that would also mean my own PC would be helping to generate the frames (files) and in those cases it's using 100% of the CPU (Xeon 12-core) and probably 10-16GB of RAM. So if during this process the system is at all pushing for it's own CPU interupts in order to scan incoming files (from other servers on the network), you can see how that'd be a problem. Each frame generally takes 10 minutes or more to generate (sometimes 20-30 mins.) so it can start to add up over time.

In the case of an outside service it's more a matter of having many files coming in all at the same time, which again I'd rather not have the OS pause and scan each and every one, at least not while I'm working.
Thanks again!
Doug

Amitai Rottem
Former Employee
Aug 01, 2017
Gotcha - for that I'd highly recommend using "Exclusions" instead of turning off the antivirus.
Two options:
1. Excluding specific directories , so think anything created in c:\myanimations
2. Excluding files written/read by specific processes. A good example is msbuild - let's you trust it, and you are a developer compiling a lot - you can ask to exclude anything msbuild.exe touches.

Instructions:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/threat-protection/windows-defender-antivirus/configure-exclusions-windows-defender-antivirus
(You can use the end user UI, as well as group policy, powershell etc).