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Developer’s Description

Results from anti-malware testing houses including the AV-TEST, AV Comparatives and SE Labs regularly show that Microsoft Defender Antivirus’s protection against both live “real world” security threats and flat scans of reference sets of recently collected malware is comparable to that of the best third party products.

Kaspersky Internet Security is now 50% off at just £17.49 per year

What features does Defender have?

Defender doesn’t skimp on features either. Your Windows Security settings include:

• Real-time malware protection: the core of any modern antivirus is the ability to detect threats as you encounter them. Whether it’s malware on a USB stick or a drive-by download, Defender excels at this, aided by the vast amount of data about malicious software sent back for analysis by the world’s many Windows systems
• On-demand scans: Scan your entire PC or specific locations, whenever you need to
• Ransomware protection: Windows gets two different kinds of ransomware protection, in the form of both version-controlled backups of your most important data to OneDrive cloud storage and folder access controls to prevent changes being made to your most important directories without your knowledge and permission
• Microsoft Defender Firewall: Microsoft’s long-standing firewall isn’t quite as glossy as those you’ll get from Kaspersky or ESET, but provides capable protection against network threats
• Reputation-based web protection: Microsoft Edge users get Microsoft SmartScreen, which blocks known phishing and malware sites
• Parental controls: set screen time, Windows store purchase protection, opt-in location tracking and content restrictions for younger members of the household, synced across all of that user’s devices if they’re correctly registered to an online Microsoft account
• Find my device: Microsoft device location and remote locking – this only works for Windows desktops, laptops, Surface and Surface Pen products, however.

As a free antivirus that’s built into every Windows PC, Microsoft Defender is better now than it has ever been. If you don’t keep personal information on your PC, Microsoft Defender provides good enough protection — but if you store sensitive files on your device, Microsoft Defender will be unable to keep them safe.

After testing the service for several weeks, I found Microsoft’s free antivirus isn’t updated frequently enough to guarantee protection against the latest threats. To get full protection, you need to use it with another antivirus. I tested a variety of free and paid options to find which services provide top-tier malware protection without slowing down your PC.