HACKER Q&A
📣 windows2020

Is Antimalware Service Executable driving you crazy?


It started maybe 6 months ago. On some computers it's perpetually at ~20% CPU and busy with the disk. It fights with Visual Studio and slows down builds. I've needed to increase CPU on some computers to accommodate it. And at home, at night, it spins up my fans and wakes me up.

Anyone else having issues?

  👤 nullindividual Accepted Answer ✓
If you're up to run Windows 11 dev builds, try Dev Drive [0] which uses ReFS on another partition, volume, or virtual disk (VHDX), by default with 4KiB clusters (! big ReFS change) and has a couple modes:

* Windows Defender running async rather than sync when reading/writing files

* Windows Defender completely disabled (along with other file system filters)

This volume is intended for code only, but you can put other workloads on the Dev Drive.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

👤 misterrobato
Try this (it adds Windows Defender exclusion to Windows Defender)

Run cmd as admin and paste:

powershell Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath 'C:\Program Files\Windows Defender' -Force

powershell Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath 'C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Defender' -Force

powershell Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath 'C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender' -Force