Re: what does Windows Defender really protects and scans for?
Defender is not a universal medecine for all the virus, spyware & adware
problems. It is a good software that finds a lot of spyware/malware, but it
is NOT an antivirus. It's not a firewall neither.
If you have only Defender installed (and no other security software) then it
make your computer an easy pray for viruses and attacks.
Personally I use Defender once every few days to make a scan of the whole
system. Also I have Ad-Aware installed that I run once a week. It is similar
to Defender, but it's always good to have an alternative since no one can
garantee that Defender (or any other antispyware) will find every single
threat in your system.
As antivirus I use AVIRA, a really cool piece of software that never let me
down for the past 2,5 years (I used it on XP, and now I have it on Vista).
They update their virus definitions several times a day and they have a
quite powerful scanner that scans on the fly every single file you access
(and it is not a resource hog like Norton of Trend Micro). There is a free
edition at
http://www.free-av.com/ (for personal use only) and a commercial
version at
http://www.avira.com/en/pages/index.php (the commercial version
has a built-in antispyware, antiphishing, firewall etc... but the antivirus
scanner is the same as in the free version).
Another thing that IMO every computer should have is a firewall. You have a
very wide spread of possibilities (including free ones). It's up to you to
make a choice. I would recommend Zone Alarm Free that I use for about 1 year
and find simple to configure and use. A firewall protects you from unwanted
connection from (an to) the Internet. You can control what installed program
can or cannot go online without your permission, update itself, or (in the
case of spyware) detect a software that tries to send gathered information
from your system somewhere (troyans, keyloggers etc...). In a few words, you
know what's going through your connection.
What's been said in a previous post about "the less software installed - the
best" is not true. The less security software you have, the more
mal/spy/ad/ware software you'll get. Of course there is no sense in
installing 3 antiviruses, 5 antispywares an 2 firewalls (that would look
like paranoia
) but I would recommend to any user to install
a) an antivirus software (and update the virus definitions daily),
b) a firewall (or at least turn on the windows firewall, it's not as bad as
a lot of people say or think)
c) an antispyware (at least use Defender a couple time a week, and don't
forget to update the definitions here too!).
Wow! that's a lot of letters I typed here, hopefully someone will find them
useful!
"A.H." <nospam@nospam.com> píse v diskusním príspevku
news:uv2FS1APIHA.4480@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
> What does Windows Defender really protects and scans for?
>
> Does Windows Defender protects against all the known virus, spyware &
> adware?
>
> That means I no longer need Norton or MacAfee or Micro Trend Antivirus? 
) manages to run them at a desirable setting. I myself do play with these games, but I still don't like knowing that once something goes through the first layer of protection, I'm dead..or my computer is anyway. Well that's just me, because I'm still schooling and I don't think my parents will take it too lightly that my computer breaks down every few months.