Microsoft Windows security review: Decent protection, but you’re still better off with a paid alternative

Formerly known as Defender, Windows 10’s built-in antivirus tool now nestles among a whole suite of security modules built into an umbrella app that’s simply called Windows Security.

Some of these other components extend your protection in some pretty nifty ways: for example, the Controlled Folder Access feature can stop ransomware in its tracks by preventing unrecognized apps from writing to your personal folders.

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Microsoft Windows Security Review: What Features Does It Have?

Microsoft’s SmartScreen technology has also evolved to take advantage of Windows 10’s extensive (and somewhat controversial) telemetry features, using them to identify and block programs with suspicious global usage patterns. Similar controls are built into the Edge browser and Microsoft Store, to protect you from suspicious websites, downloads, and apps.

The Windows Security Console also brings together various features that were previously scattered throughout the Settings app. These include Secure Boot, which can defeat rootkits by preventing the BIOS from executing boot code that doesn’t have the correct cryptographic signature, and Windows Hello, which replaces your password with biometric authentication. Windows built-in parental controls are also managed from here, as is the built-in firewall.

With all of this built right into the operating system, you might be wondering why you would need to install additional security software. Indeed, an overall protection rating of 100% from AV-Comparatives and AV-Test offers pretty good assurance that if you just leave Windows with its default protections enabled, you’re very unlikely to get infected. .

The problem is that living with Windows Security isn’t a particularly pleasant experience. When the system thinks it has found a threat, it displays a pithy, almost cheeky notification, stating only that the antivirus component has “found threats.” If you want to know what they were or what Windows did about them, you’ll have to dig into the Security app, locate the relevant timestamp in the event list, and approve a UAC requestor just to see the basic details. .

This isn’t a one-off either – it’s the same with Windows Security. The process of authorizing an app through Controlled Folder Access is equally complicated, which is perhaps why this feature is unnecessarily disabled by default.

Even navigating it can be a chore: basic security settings sit alongside arcane technical controls, and since nearly every page is laid out as a list of closely spaced text elements, taking stock of what’s in front of you involves a tedious amount of hovering and scrolling. The honorable exceptions are the firewall, which opens as an MMC snap-in, and the family safety controls, which, as always, are managed from a colorful web console.

Microsoft Windows Security Review: How good is the protection and performance?

Perhaps the most frustrating thing about Windows Security’s fundamentally horrible design is that you can’t completely avoid it. In AV-Comparatives and AV-Test’s malware tests, the antivirus module racked up five false positives, implying that sooner or later you may need to go in and restore a file that has been blocked wrongly.

Even after going through the rigmarole of rescuing an item from quarantine, Windows will simply zap the file the next time you access it or scan it, unless you also dig into the settings page, scroll down and go through the laborious process of manually adding the file to your exclusions list.

If all of this is starting to disable Windows security for you, this next part might finish the job. Of all the security suites we’ve tested recently, both paid and free, Microsoft’s own code ranks last in terms of system impact.

Manual scanning is also slow and expected turnaround times seem to bear no relation to reality. At one point during our testing, the virus scanner confidently told us that it expected it to be finished in 13 seconds when in fact there were over six minutes of shredding to go. To do.

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Microsoft Windows Security Review (2020): Should You Stick With This?

I wish I was more positive about Windows security. Microsoft deserves credit for continuously working to make Windows more secure and for bringing antivirus performance to levels that match the highest paid security suites. And as Windows accumulates a growing range of security features, it makes sense to bring them under one roof.

Unfortunately, Microsoft seems to have given zero consideration to the user experience, leaving us with a sprawling and confusing hodgepodge that’s neither efficient nor intuitive. Perhaps the main saving grace of Windows security is that key modules politely disable themselves when you install a third-party alternative, while the firewall and other low-level protections continue to do their job behind the scenes.

This means you can get the best of both worlds by installing a more nimble, user-friendly third-party package to support day-to-day security tasks – and we strongly recommend that you do.