Why do I Disable Windows Defender on Windows 8.1

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This morning I noticed that my computer is running quite slow. A quick look at the Task Manager I notice the Windows Defender is taking a big share of the resources. I was concerned but do not want to spend time to deal with it and hoping that after some disk scan it will quiet down. Just a quick a note: the CPU was about 25% consumed while the disk is quite high - at times it stay at 100%.

At the evening of the day, I noticed that not much have changed. This really bothered me. Not much of the CPU but the long consumption of the disk for more than 10 hours?

I began Google for ways to stop/disable/uninstall the service. I then learned that you can't really uninstalled the thing - it has been mentioned that it is an integrated part of Windows 8.1 and people take over registry and folders to get rid of it actually find themselves a dead PC. When I did locate few articles about disable the thing, I found that my version of the software do not provide options mentioned in those articles - I suspect that my version of the software must have gone through several upgrades and some of those options must have been removed.

At that point, I was totally frustrated and thinking that 'absolute power corrupts absolutely' - it is not that Microsoft did not mean well. However, when you believe you knows better and do not give user options, there will be times that you miscalculated.

In this case, however, I was fortunately enough to locate the article '3 Ways to Disable Windows Defender on Windows 8/8.1'. The Group Policy method did work and I was able to disable the software.

* A side note. I was trying to work on folder and file permissions in order to stop the software. But failed. The thought? Well, I think it is very interesting in the sense of social behavior. The 'administrator' used to be considered the GOD and is, presumably, given all the power to do things. These days, administrator is no longer trusted and did not, in plain obvious way, given all the power to perform all the things. The administrator these days were guarded against by Microsoft via other layers of security complexity. The registry and the group policy are now the higher layer of security complexity. Without master/tinker with these layer of complexity, administrator's rights are limited.

One big problem with these additional layer of security complexity is that these complexity is not to understand logically - it is a guess and try memorization. It is also subject to change whenever the software update. These settings are totally in the hands of the software. How the software using the registry and group policy value determines if the administrator will have the rights or not. The right of administrator is no longer a given and this added load to administrators' shoulders.

* Question: For the human race, is this approach a step forward?


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