Effectiveness of Windows Defender

Long View,
I like your approach. However, I have two questions. Why do you Windows Defender and do you find it effective?

~non Spywareblaster related discussion moved from this thread....Bubba~

 

Re: SpywareBlaster

why windows defender ? well I used to have Giant which I thought was better than most others and then Giant was bought up by Microsoft. But I guess the main reason is that now being made by Microsoft might make it more compatible with widows ? I agree its a bit of a long shot. By the way for some months Defender has simply been installed and not actively running.

I do have antivir active even though it has never reported a virus. before that I used Avast and before than AVG anti virus.

How effective is Defender ? I have no idea. It has never reported any spyware. BUT - yesterday I installed AVG AS and it showed up nothing. A few weeks ago I tried Prevx - results nothing. A few weeks before that A2 - again nothing. when I'm done testing I restore the last previous clean system image and move on.

So as I have no way of really evaluating anti virus or spyware programs. I have tended to assume that the hardware firewall, Firefox, and my mail company are the main reasons that nothing bad gets in. It helps that spam is cleaned and that I'm not tempted to open attachments, nor reply to false "paypal" or "ebay" mail and finally that I wouldn't know where to find the so call dark side of the net.

 

I installed Windows Defender back when it was called Windows Antispyware. I kept it until the name change and ran it as Windows Defender for about a year. In all that time it picked up 1 piece of malware. In the same time frame I was able to remove countless data miners using Ad-Aware and SS. I uninstalled WD and retrieved my disk space.

 

Windows anti spyware found more spyware then defender IMHO