Windows Defender is an inbuilt tool into Windows Vista and available as a free download from Microsoft for XP users.
Windows Defender is easy to use and lets you do manual, scheduled, and real-time scanning with automatic updates of spyware signatures, without a large performance penalty.
If you have already installed or using a third-party anti-spyware application, there's really no need to keep Windows Defender's real-time scan enabled. In this case you can get a performance increase by disabling it.
Using Windows Defender
Selecting Tools and Settings will start you off in the appropriate window to stop applications from active on startup by selecting Software Explorer. Users can make other adjustments from here as well.
Selecting Tools and Settings will start you off in the appropriate window to stop applications from active on startup by selecting Software Explorer.
Some users find the Real-Time scanning annoying because the hard drive is always busy, just go into Options and disable it. Uncheck the box for "use real-time protection". This is really helpful on a laptop, where every little bit of tweaking helps battery life.
Keep the automatic updates set so that you don’t have to worry about updating the protection database.
Microsoft Windows Defender allows users several options for scans. Quick Scans which scan essential OS directories, Full Scan which scans all files and folder, and Custom Scan which allows us to choose what to scan.
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