In reply to a post by pluralist:

I note that was using Windows 10 Professional. That may or may not be relevant.

It is not relevant. MS doesn’t differentiate on standalone setups.

Corporates with around 500 or more can sign up to a cloud service, formerly called Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection, which gives central control, and reporting - required for compliance reporting. It doesn’t change the protection level.

In reply to a post by jchamier:

In reply to a post by pluralist:

I note that was using Windows 10 Professional. That may or may not be relevant.

It is not relevant. MS doesn’t differentiate on standalone setups.

Thanks for letting us know.

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

Thanks for letting us know.

If you use Windows Enterprise then all bets are off, but at that point you're business scale.

mban.exe is part of malwarebytes and ran as a service most times I started my laptop. Sometimes it would hog the CPU and would slow down the startup process.

In response to the OP:

Microsoft Defender gets decent reviews these days and is OK for most purposes. If you want to ditch Kaspersky for something that might be a bit more effective than Defender the best free bet right now is probably Avira. Avast Free is effective but produces too many noisy popups trying to sell premium features for my liking, whereas Avira only produces one or two popups per week. I used Bitdefender Free until recently which was great (and silent) but this has now been discontinued.

I also use Malwarebytes (free version) but only on demand for an occasional malware scan.

Edited by Stargazer99 (Thu 22-Sep-22 18:32:06)

In reply to a post by Stargazer99:

In response to the OP:

Microsoft Defender gets decent reviews these days and is OK for most purposes. If you want to ditch Kaspersky for something that might be a bit more effective than Defender the best free bet right now is probably Avira.

Could you explain why Avira is "more effective" than Windows security most advice seems to be that you no longer need a third-party AV.



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Edited by Jack_Hackett (Thu 22-Sep-22 20:41:42)

In reply to a post by Jack_Hackett:

Could you explain why Avira is "more effective" than Windows security most advice seems to be that you no longer need a third-party AV.

and third party testing reports the built in tool meets all requirements. Even better it doesn’t expire or require payment, or change parts of the operating system that prevent security patches being applied. So in all a win I think.