New laptop and the free McAfee trial has expired. I have Windows Defender as standard, is it any good ? what are you all using?
TIA

Yes.

Uninstall McAfee, Defender should kick in.

Keep Windows up to date, watch out for side-loaded apps when installing things, don’t click on stupid shit.

Yes. Never had an issue only using defender. And I look at some dodgy crap let me tell you.

Defender + Malwarebytes here; Malwarebytes cleared off some things Defender missed for me.

I’d usually say yes, but recently my Son managed to download ‘Chromium’ and Defender and MalwareBytes couldn’t touch it – had to install my work license for ESET to remove it.

Now, Chromium is sort of legit, it’s not a virus and it’s debatable whether it’s Malware, well unless you’ve ever tried to use a PC with it installed or indeed tried to remove it, then there’s little doubt.

Still Defender is better than any other free AV we’ve seen and unlike them does come with an element of support.

My McAfee trial also expired recently, Defender looks a totally capable replacement.

Saying that, I’m currently trying out Bitdefender Free – a very minimal interface which I like and no constant pestering to upgrade to the paid version.

EDIT – I have kept Defender enabled for periodic scanning – belt and braces and all that…

Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome. It’s not generally intended for downloading to install for end users (except Linux where it’s often packed up instead of the full Chrome on the more open source distributions).

Shouldn’t be anything dodgy with it, though it could have been packaged by a dodgy download site with lots of junk.

Anyway, Defender is generally fine enough, but it doesn’t deal with adware, nagware and just generally badly written software that doesn’t uninstall properly (*cough* McAfee *cough*).

Defender + some common sense on what you download and careful check on where you are downloading from + occasional use of MalwareBytes.

EDIT – I have kept Defender enabled for periodic scanning – belt and braces and all that…

You really don’t want two AV products running.

Defender is fine, but as mentioned above, if a user has admin privelidge and insists on running dodgyvirus.exe, then that’s that

Thanks all much appreciated.

Chromium is sort of legit

Why only sort of? What problems did it cause? It’s respectable in Linux land although I never understood what it was for.

Bitdefender is excellent.

Free for private use, not a resource hog and regularly comes out on top in tests.

You really don’t want two AV products running.

I don’t. Defender only runs periodic scanning i.e. it’s not real-time. As recommended by Windows when I installed Bitdefender.

Why only sort of? What problems did it cause? It’s respectable in Linux land although I never understood what it was for.

Chromium itself is legit, it’s the project name for the Chrome browser. But because it’s open-source, by design it’s trivial for people to publish their own versions – Opera is based on Chromium, for example. Therefore someone could create a rogue version loaded with trojans.

Therefore someone could create a rogue version loaded with trojans.

Greeks, surely?

In short, leave Defender and Windows updates enabled, and don’t use an account with admin privilege for normal day to day stuff. Create non-admin accounts for children to use. Don’t bypass UAC without looking at what you’re actually permitting. Do these few things and it’s very unlikely you’ll have problems.

If you’re going to be pestered over the holidays by various relatives to clean up their last year’s worth of unwise browsing activity you can’t do much better than follow the guidelines on Decent Security.

Therefore someone could create a rogue version loaded with trojans.

Ok well that is true of any OS software or indeed any software isn’t it? Although the latter less likely of course.

Trouble with AV software is you never really know how good it is. If it doesn’t detect stuff, you will not know about it. The amount of times I have changed to new AV software at work and suddenly you get all sorts of new detections that you never knew you had before.