HACKER Q&A
📣 jdthedisciple

Do you build your own antivirus?


Do I really need antivirus software? I'm pretty good at telling apart safe from hazardous URLs and Websites. And MS Defender never caught a single virus/piece of malware anyway in all those years.

The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web.

Is it enough to "build" your own antivirus by simply blocking some hosts and being otherwise careful, and disabling Windows Defender? Do you guys do that?

  👤 alpaca128 Accepted Answer ✓
> MS Defender never caught a single virus/piece of malware anyway in all those years.

How do you know? MS Defender just doesn't advertise itself with warning popups every other day because it's not Microsoft's business model. Not to mention it likely isn't even close to being the most resource draining part of Windows.

> The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web.

Well if you don't want it to sound like a Bitcoin miner turning off the antivirus isn't going to help. The more likely reason for the fans spinning up are bloated websites.

👤 haunter
>The goal being reducing a lot of the background work constantly being done on my Windows machine, which makes it real loud for seemingly no good reason whatsoever, as if I was mining Bitcoin when I'm just surfin' the damn web.

Specs? If it’s a desktop PC then what case and how many fans? Did you try adjusting the fan curves or undervolting?

My PC is dead silent (i5-13600k) and pretty much all desktop PC can be made more silent either hardware or software way.

But honestly if the default antivirus has this big effect on your PC then you have some bigger problems. By default it’s basically not using any CPU at all.

👤 asynchronyse
You can turn off background scans in your group settings without getting rid of the entire thing.

1. Run gpedit.msc

2. Navigate to administrative templates -> windows components -> Microsoft defender antivirus -> real-time protection -> turn off real-time protection

3. Set 'enabled'

👤 eternityforest
Do you have something going on in the background for it to be scanning? Some kind of weird browser that mines attention coins of checks every byte against a block list API of forbidden octal values? IPFS? An actual virus that it didn't catch that does in fact mine Bitcoin?

Why is MS defender doing that? Microsoft is a billion dollar company, and it's not like they don't make any effort to have good performance.

I sure would look for just about any other solution before even thinking of trying to hack together an alternative for a common piece of complex software.