just bought my partner a replacement for her dying laptop: a nice business class small form desktop Dell refurb with WIN 11. Good Craigslist deal, btw.
Anywhos I have to install a MS Office key tomorrow and fine tune some stuff…
OK here’s the question. Has WIN11, and by extenstion MS Inc, radically improved their AV/MW since the sucky olde days? I keep reading MS Defender just as good (in test comparisons) with your Macafees, ESETs, etc etc.
I would LOVE not to pay the annual bill for 3rd party protections. If you have WIN 11 do you trust Defender? Or keep paying third parties?
Appreciate any 2 cents about this. Thank you.
However a more serious response to your question but back when I was using Windows I only used Defender, back when you could disable it I used to always have it disabled and not running at all and had no viruses (I will add this isn’t a bright thing to do on Windows). I at least know on Windows 10 they improved the AV a lot since Windows 7 and this has carried over to Windows 11 as it’s the same but redesigned UI. It would technically be Microsoft’s best interest to ensure no viruses affect their systems easily, how much trust in them is up to the end user though, I wouldn’t considering the questionable things they are doing which make their system more vulnerable anyway in other areas.
Some third party antiviruses even utilise Windows security to run in, at least in the companies I’ve worked for for end point protection.
So if I had to use windows for a reason as a personal device, I am fine and trust windows Defender purely on the fact that a lot of third part options are not really any better by much and you lose money using them. If a business owned device then endpoint protection is a must for me but that is a different thing entirely for meeting security requirements of a business.
that’s what reading some articles led me to believe as well. thank you
I walked away from that outfit many years ago.
Wife’s reason for staying with them is problematic. She uses my EOS a lot and knows her way around. She designs educational Powerpoints and stuff like that an if she opens a ppt in LibreOffice she will always see it jump a couple picas it scares her away…I try to explain it happens to every doc (except pdf) cross-platform and it always will.
these days and days past. remember when they were inventing the windows viruses so when they scanned they could “find” one and all sorts of trickery like that? Thank you for that opinion, snake oil I agree,
Sometimes I feel like the only human being on the planet whose life was changed when they read the entire EULA and PrivPolicy. Because it did. Thanks for the respone.
Very understandable.
That said, given you say she feels comfortable using EOS, has she tried alternatives for ppt that could free her from the OS itself?
For example using some online (in-browser) platform for slides would probably resolve this, no?
I believe even MS offers in-browser tools for office now with MSO365 (and last I remember they even offer “enhanced” experience through MS Edge, which does get packaged as rpm, deb, and probably in AUR).
She avoids the cloud like I do [I agree it’s good to protect her work] so 365 would be off the table. But any other alternatives, yes. Or she could listen to me and realize a bunch of little kids sitting at a desk aren’t going to judge a header that may of jumped 1/4"…because they never saw in its right ful position…
…now you got me thinking. PDF’s are basicially snapshots of fluid work. they are fixed. they DO NOT move [rare sysfont situations]…can one make individual power point slides pdfs? Like export a single page in powerpoint as a PDF then bring the PDF into a power point pageholder? Mmmmm.
I appreciate your efforts to liberate her We shall keep trying! Thank you.
windows has their own version of firejail or similar?
That’d be the Windows Sandbox feature, but you can explicitly sandbox Defender and its engine (running it in an AppContainer) by running setx /M MP_FORCE_USE_SANDBOX 1 in an admin cmd.
I don’t think trust is the right word. But i can say this. Most 3rd party anti-virus, malware programs are not worth installing whether they are free versions or paid. I have only used Windows defender for sometime and i haven’t had any issues. I have also used Eset online scanner on occasion because it’s free rather than buying the full retail version. Just keep Windows updates current so it gets any new security patches for defender and you shouldn’t have any problem. Run a quick scan when your on the computer and occasionally run a full scan.
Comparison tests are a point-in-time snapshot of how an antivirus software might perform in the real world. Those type of tests mean very little. Its been years since I used Windows, but Defender was all I ever ran on XP through Win 7 and I never had an infection. Just be safe when you surf.
The PDF idea kind of works providing she isn’t using any of powerpoint’s animation/transition stuff for presentations (which is, honestly, the only reason to use powerpoint over any other thing you could possibly use to show someone something).
I imagine engaging kids in content works very similarly to engaging your average manager (in my professional experience you could swap most managers for any given child and struggle to spot the difference) so having access to those is probably desirable, which would make a PDF a non-starter unfortunately.
Defender is ‘adequate’ in my experience - I never ran anything extra since it became a thing and never had any kind of infection, only butted heads with it on the rare occasion it had a false positive for something that I was using to circumvent other things which isn’t a scenario your other half is likely to find themselves in given their use case
I think honestly it’s pretty rare for Windows machines to fall prey to random, arbitrary infections in the modern era - not so much through increased security but through increased sophistication on behalf of the people doing the attacking.
Outside of people doing intensely silly stuff like downloading things that absolutely scream ‘Malware’ to anyone who’s been on the internet for more than 5 minutes, bad actors are much more interested in targeted attacks on known entities because it’s proving lucrative.
My biggest qualm with Defender, as I’ve mentioned, is how easily malware can disable its tamper protection and bypass it. Sure, it has good detection rate, lots of updates and a big database since it’s the default AV - but for the weak anti-tampering reason alone I find it hard to recommend. And when the third party options aren’t that good either, it’s hard for me to resist plugging Linux…
Have to echo some of what @z580c said, even a newb like me knows that the first and probably best line of defence is learning/teaching best practices, where to go/not go, what to download/not download, etc.
So I would start with teaching your partner that stuff if he/she doesn’t know them already, instead of relying on defender to bail you out when the shit hits the fan.
And even with that in place and the best av solution under the sun nothing is gonna save you from 0 day attacks/unknown expoits for example. So when it really comes down to it we’re all F-ed anyway in my opinion…
If you want to use Windows, Windows Defender is more than enough. While A/V companies oversell themselves, they aren’t snake oil. They can do a better job at cleaning up stuff than Defender, but Defender is a good enough option for as a first layer of protection.
yeah gotcha all. this woman is the brains of the partnership and doesn’t color outside the lines as far as internet etiquette. Chasing some celebrity news all the way to TMZ might be as lurid as she lives.
Her brainless partner however…
I would recommend you install her an adblocker. Even if she is using a Chromium browser, from my testing, uBlock Origin Lite works the same as uBlock Origin. That would be the first line of attack. If possible, please teach her some good computing habits to keep herself safe and you should be fine.
If you have Windows 11 and Microsoft Defender comes with it…use it. You trust it to do its job, while phoning back home like any other MS product. As far as AV goes it is actually one of the better ones since they have companion products for Enterprise solutions. I have it on good authority that they have roughly 40 dedicated interns adding virus definitions at all times, not including the paid staff. Basically they are on top of it, keeping it up to date and with an AV that is the most important part.
We shall keep trying! Thank you.
