My Lenovo Yoga has 16 Gigs of Ram and windows defender was taking up a little over 20%. Absolutely rediculous that it would allow it to use that much. After that, click on the Restart Now button in Windows Security. Another way is to start Autoruns and check the WinDefend service. After that, you will see that Virus & threat protection is disabled. As shown in the previous step, make sure that Real-time protection is Off. Finally, restart your system for the changes to take place.

• But sometimes, these antivirus software can be a mess for a lot of reasons; top-most being, they use up an extreme amount of memory.
• In many cases, these two legitimate pieces of software are not infected by viruses, exploits, rogues or other form of malware.
• You don’t need to manually turn off Windows Defender antivirus if you download third-party antivirus software.

And while Windows Defender can turn itself off if it detects another antivirus in order to avoid interference, it’s not always reliable. If you’re looking to disable Windows Defender Antivirus permanently on Windows 10, you should be following these instructions. At any time, you can revert the changes using the same instructions, but on step 6, make sure to change the value from 1 to 0, or delete the DisableAvCheck key. From the right-hand pane, Search for Turn Off Windows Defender Antivirus and open and Enable the Group Policy editor. Toggle the switch to off under Real-time protection. Once you clicked, from the left-hand pane you can see open Windows security.

Enter “DisableAntiSpyware” as the name and hit Enter. Under Protection Areas, click on Virus & threat protection. Right-click on the Real-Time Protection key, selectNew, and click onDWORD (32-bit) Value. Right-click on the Windows Defender key, selectNew, and click onDWORD (32-bit) Value. Use theWindows key + Rkeyboard shortcut to open theRuncommand.

Reasons To Disable The Windows Defender Antivirus On Your Windows 10 Computer

Then, type sfc /scannow into the elevated Command Prompt console and press Enter. For all earlier versions of Windows, I’d suggest you downloaded the latest service pack for it, and installed that. Since Microsoft no longer hosts these downloads, you will need to acquire it from a third-party source. That said, if you don’t have an antivirus tool, for whatever reason, maybe your subscription run out or you’ve never paid system security much attention. Then I suggest you give my post on the best antivirus solutions, a look. So here the first thing you’ll want to do, is uninstall the program that the error occurred in.

Fix 3: Reinstall The Microsoft Visual C ++ Redistributable Package

So if you are facing such an issue, go with the more powerful Group Policy Editor which controls the behavior of all system applications on Windows 10 Pro. Apart from that, the older way to disable Windows Defender using Windows Services no longer works so I have not mentioned that method. If you found the article helpful, do let us know in the comment section below. Contrary to the popular misconception, Microsoft has been shipping a barebone anti-spyware since the Windows XP days.