Comment by Narishma

3 years ago

> Turning off Windows Defender's protection(s) should give the first visible speed boost, if that's what you prefer.

It's extremely hard to do that in recent versions of Windows. The most I managed to do the last time I tried was to disable it temporarily but it always comes back after a while.

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Narishma

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jandrese  3 years ago

A couple of years ago I was doing a mass copy of files from one SSD to another. It was a few hundred GB, not terribly big on modern machines but it did have a large number of tiny files. Windows was doing the copy but it was estimating that the whole thing would need 8 hours to complete, and the estimate was pretty solid after 20 minutes. I cancelled the copy to investigate and tried turning off Windows Defender (but only temporarily as you said) and restarted the copy. It finished in 35 minutes. Probably would have been even faster if I didn't have one of the drives hooked to an old USB->SATA adapter.

This is also why your browser will stall out when it finishes downloading a large file. Windows Defender kicks in an does a full scan before returning from the close call.

dataflow  3 years ago

Yeah, unfortunately you need to do it with group policy.

  • Dylan16807  3 years ago

    As far as I can tell they've removed the ability to turn off real-time scanning with group policy, so you have to disable the entire thing and not get on-demand or scheduled or download scans.

    • eppsilon  3 years ago

      Defender will disable itself if it detects another AV product is installed...maybe someone should make one that acts as a no-op AV scanner.

    • arsome  3 years ago

      Seems to be working for me still, though I set the GPO back on Win10 and it carried over to Win11 through an upgrade. I see some reports of needing to disable tamper protection first but should still work.

      1 reply →

THENATHE  3 years ago

I’ve wanted to use one of those “gaming focused” stripped down windows installs for the longest time because all of the garbage is removed. It’s like Linux but not a pain in the ass for playing games and doing mundane shit. Too bad I care about security

navjack27  3 years ago

It's easy to do. You set exclusions for whole root drive letters. It scans nothing for me on Windows 11