How we'll compare free and paid
Today we’re going to be having a look at the Windows Defender system that comes free with all your Windows installations. We’re going to have a look at to see whether it’s something you should keep or should you replace it with one of the paid antivirus systems?
We’ll have a look at what the Windows Defender security system is like in a standard Windows 10 implementation. This will give us a comparison with the features of other security software.
Windows Defender Security Centre
Look at Windows Defender by opening the Windows Defender Security Center. It has a number of areas you can look at:
- Virus threat protection
- How your device is performing
- How the firewalls operating
- How it particularly deals with apps and browsers
- Also some family parental controls
Let’s go and look at the details of these.
If we look at the virus threat protection it provides, you have:
- A scan history with any threats found
- Options for a quick or advanced scan
- Settings – you can go and have a look at virus and threat protection settings and see when the last update was.
Device performance and health is covered in the other section. In particular, it looks at what windows update issues you may have had how your storage capacity is going along with any device driver issues.
Firewall and network protection is next. For example, check if your connection is set as a public network.
Also there’s what is called app and browser control. If we go into this you can see we are warned depending on whether it has recognized the apps and files.
There is the family option area where are their parental controls. These aren’t activated by default.
That’s an overview of the Windows Defender security center so we can compare these options with what we find in other systems.
Extras paid systems offer
Now that seems okay so why wouldn’t I recommend Windows Defender? Well, looking more closely people have found that although it has a reasonable single line of defense it doesn’t really provide backup testing for other ways of picking up viruses. This means if something slipped through its first line of defense, which it may do if it’s a Zero Day Threat, which means it’s a very early release of a particular virus, then it’s not as good as other systems in picking this up with extra lines of defense.
Other antivirus systems will look at the behavior of the particular files and so even if it doesn’t recognize the signature of the file it may be able to pick it up with the behavior of the file. So for this reason, I recommend you go with the paid antivirus options. If you have a look at the other reviews and here you’ll see what the options are.
Personally I recommend McAfee Internet Security for Windows systems particularly because I’ve found that in my Windows system it seems to be the one that keeps the system running most smoothly while it’s doing its stuff in the background. Maybe it’s just my graphic drivers or something else about my system, but I have found that some of the other types of antivirus do introduce some instabilities to my Windows system so for that reason over the years I’ve settled on McAfee is my recommended system
My recommendation for Windows
Personally I recommend McAfee Internet Security for Windows systems particularly because I’ve found that in my Windows system it seems to be the one that keeps the system running most smoothly while it’s doing its stuff in the background. Maybe it’s just my graphic drivers or something else about my system, but I have found that some of the other types of antivirus do introduce some instabilities to my Windows system so for that reason over the years I’ve settled on McAfee is my recommended system
