Windows 8 forum: Poll: Do you use Windows Defender to protect your PC?

Hi,

We've installed Windows 8 on three computers and each uses Windows Defender. I have found it to be quite effective, though I still regularly run Malwarebytes to do a more exhaustive check for malware and CC Cleaner to remove junk. Oddly, on just one of our computers, I often have to run the quick check manually as it seems the scheduler doesn't always work. As it's the one I use, whenever the flag indicates I need to run it I do. That said, the protection is always on, so it rarely finds anything, which is good. We used to run Norton and McAfee and I'm please to report that Windows Defender doesn't seem to interfer with any of the programs we use, unlike the competition, and that's a pleasure. I never enjoyed reconfiguring either Norton or McAfee to work with downloads and programs that needed to communicate on the net. Defender seems much better in that respect.

McAfee is CRAP! Microsoft Security Essentials is FREEEEEEE and it works great! This is Best Buy's biggest SCAM! Selling the worthless antivirus programs when a much better and FREEEEEEEE antivirus is available. Windows 8 is doing you a service by rejecting the worthless antivirus.

There are other free anti-viruses that you can get from other places besides Microsoft, and I don't trust Microsoft's work on all of this in the security department. If Microsoft was really doing all of this to help secure their systems wouldn't all of this be installed by default on Windows? The problem is that it isn't the best working security program out there, it's just one of the cheapest and it gets shoved down people's throats repeatedly through Windows Update.

I call Microsoft's newer stuff, at least with the interfaces they have, their worst products. I'm still using XP Pro with the old Win 95 interface, and I haven't had one thing that hasn't worked for me. And actually I've used the free Avast Anti-virus on all of my computers for the past several years, along side a couple routers for firewalls, and the system has even caught a couple viruses that I had in through files off the internet.