Hi Windows folks. I’m setting up a new laptop for a family member and it’ll have to be Windows 11. The salesperson at the store obviously wanted to upsell us their security software, but I told him we’d just use Defender.
Is that still the go-to? Back in the day I used Malwarebytes, is that any good these days?
Any other debloat tips for Windows I might want to know? Thanks gang!
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Defender is fine, no point buying anything else.
Thought so! Thanks to you and the other replies for chiming in.
It’s good. I wouldn’t spend any money on a third party AV product outside of enterprise solutions when there’s a bundle of factors at play. There’s some settings you can poke to make it more restrictive.
Running “debloat” scripts and the like, depending on what it does, can turn it off or otherwise neutralize it.
+1 for Firefox with uBlock Origin (and the built-in Malware lists) as a part of a healthy security strategy.
For the tech illiterate, one of the easiest ways in is “VIRUS DETECTED SCAN NOW WITH OUR TOOL” “ads”. Ad block so it doesn’t even appear is the first line of defense against that shit.
Following that, there are a few good debloat tools out there, my recent go-to has been the CTT winutil, it’s free, well documented, and includes O&O ShutUp 10++. Together they can clear out most of the built-in junk on Windows 11, with two notes:
- There’s always the risk of updates undoing whatever you have done, so you may need to check in occasionally and rerun.
- CTT’s + O&O’s definitions of “non–essential” may not align with your own. To paraphrase everyone’s favorite spider aunt and/or uncle, “With great power comes great responsibility.” Take your time and do your homework on what you’re changing. Don’t go with the fully automatic nuclear option unless you’ve reviewed everything.
Yeah, Defender is good. I would also install an adblocker (uBlock Origin or uBlock Lite) if that family member is technologically competent enough for you to tell them “if a website ever doesn’t work, click here to turn this off”.
Malware Bytes free is never a bad idea, again only if you think this person can figure out how to manually run a full scan periodically. I always run a full scan with it if I’m trying to clear ad-ware off someone’s PC and I want a second opinion in addition to Defender.
It depends on what you are doing.
General web browsing, you are fine with Firefox and an adblocker.
Have a kid who plays games on it? Not so much as the first things malware does is disabled defender because it is so common.
There is a YouTube channel that basically gets malware samples and runs them to see what each vendor lets through, can’t remember the channel though.
