Is Windows Defender really of any use?

Tested it against 63 fresh malware samples from MDL. It only detected 2
Personally I'm not keeping it.

 

with Spynet or no?

 

Tested with Spynet Advanced On-Demand.

 

What makes it useful for IE8, because it scans downloaded files? Don't all real-time scanners (AV or AS) do that?

Why do you use it SIR****TMG, are there not many better alternatives?

 

Tested again with more malware. It got 94/568

 

I used WD for a long time on my smaller laptop & considered it an extra layer of protection. It had some interesting tools as well, like 'software explorer' which I found very useful once or twice. Along with Spybot it did miss a trojan on the laptop once though (caught by SUPERAntiSpyware) but even after I got rid of Spybot & Norton I kept WD running. Eventually I started to use MSE on the laptop which automatically disables WD when you download it. I have only ever used MSE on my desktop so WD is superfluous. I kinda miss WD in a way.

 

It definately works, It poped up with a nasty sometime ago and immediately blocked it

 

I checked the "History" section of Windows Defender, just to see if there was anything there. It had about two dozen entries, all "Names" were unknown, all "Alert Levels" were unknown. If I read the description it says:

Which program?

What software publisher?

The only other information is under "Resources" where they each mention a couple of different registry keys.

The worst thing is that everything is set to "Permit" and I can't see a button to Deny.

What are all these actions it is allowing? How can I find out what each action actually is and how do I choose to deny any of them?

 

I think the problem we all have is there are better free solutions currently then WD. I think it's useless to those that know better and probably better than nothing for those that are uninformed.

 

A friend of mine downloaded a cracked software, and his Nod32 v3 missed the TDL3 rootkit inside, but Windows defender didn't, so that was quite nice, but I've never seen it catch anything else, except one false positive.

 

imo its 100% useless, better go with a third party replacement or none at all in wich case it b like runnin wd but without the wasted resources.