
I’ve gone back to using Microsoft Defender to keep me safe without hassle
For many years I used the free version of antivirus products. It is a perfectly legitimate business model to offer a product for free and use that product to entice the user to upgrade to a paid product offering more functionality. However, there were two reasons that I stopped using free antivirus products:
- The enticements, adverts, and come-ons became more irritatingly intrusive.
- Some of the marketing methods of some of the free antivirus products increasingly crossed lines of what I consider acceptable (eg using red buttons that you don’t want the user to click on, and green ones that you do want them to click on).
So, I decided to try Microsoft’s own Windows Defender (since renamed Microsoft Defender). For somewhere up to two years I had no problems whatever. Defender just quietly got on with the job. It didn’t try to up-sell me. It didn’t try to frighten me with scary popups about what a dangerous world it is out there or how clever it had been in saving me from digital disaster. In fact, it didn’t do anything except what it was supposed to do.
Then one day I succumbed to a marketing ploy of Norton / PC World and bought a subscription for Norton antivirus covering five machines for a very small sum of about £15. My reasoning was that it might be a good idea to keep abreast of what a premium antivirus product offered and how to use it. It was a pain to set up so that it didn’t keep sending un-necessary notifications, and you have to find out how to turn off “autorenewal” if you don’t want a really nasty shock of a big bill a year later. But, it did the job. It didn’t let anything nasty through onto any of my machines. The next year I hunted out a similar offer in PC World.
Shame on you, Norton. I say that with sadness as I am someone who has been around PCs long enough to remember just how invaluable Norton Utilities used to be in the pre-Windows DOS days.
For some other opinions on how Microsoft Defender stacks up against other antivirus programs, have a look at these: