MS Defender, is it any good or is it rubbish?

I just wondered if anyone has any views on MS Defender? I just initiated it on my notebook although I run Norton as well. I don't have it on autoscan in case it clashes with Norton & tries to duke it out on my hard drive !

I quite like its simplicity & it is probably good to have a couple of anti spyware & anti bot systems anyway.

What I am interested in is that many people tell me it is rubbish & that I should uninstall it & replace it with Spybot or something.

I can't believe that Microsoft would put a deficient product on the market (it is on my Vista Home Premium as standard). I admit that I much prefer Safari 3 &/or Firefox 3 to IE, & even RealPlayer to MS Media but MS isn't that bad after all. I quite like Vista (now the bugs have gone).

I have been told that the sheer simplicity & pedestrian design of Defender makes some people think it is not as good as Spybot which supposedly has a geeky interface that looks good.

Does anyone have a serious take on this?

 

Just how much spyware can you have?

Thanks for your reply Evan, I have two forms of anti-spy/bot (with the Norton) & I even have the anti-spy on the Yahoo toolbar I have on IE. I don't run it much as it's on IE & I have Safari 3 as my default browser & I use Firefox a lot for some forums I visit as Safari has some RTF compatibility issues (particularly with Yahoo for some reason).

Is it worth me downloading Spybot as well? Or is this over-egging the pudding so to speak. I am running a Belinea o.book 3 & I don't know if it really has the memory or speed to cope.

 

Everybody hates Norton ...

I have actually considered this, but I get Norton with the BT Yahoo package. I had Bullguard on a 3 month trial but decided to go with the Norton when that ran out. Admittedly Norton may not be user friendly, once I'd downloaded it & got the updates done I checked the firewall in the security centre & found I had a load of updates to catch up on. It doesn't automatically update either, unless you configure it to. There are also Symantec upgrades, as well as the Norton, just to make it more confusing!

It still won't let me open IE if I have the Yahoo messenger on! Luckily I use Safari & Firefox mostly. I rarely use IE.

Cheers anyway.

 

Norton has gotten a bad reputation from many for its insidious way of digging itself deeply into one's registry and requiring a good deal of one's resources to run efficiently. However, "if" you have the resources and "if" it is working well on your computer then why mess with it? If it were on my computer I would simply go with it. I have McAfee and while it also receives a bum rap from a lot of folks, it works well for me. As for downloading Spybot, you should be fine with or without it. Many folks here like to use a number of malware and anti-spyware programs (running on demand rather than in the background). I'm one of the few that runs only two: McAfee and Webroot's Spysweeper. They work just fine for me. What I'm trying to say is... if what you have is working for you and you haven't experienced any problems, you should be good to go with what you have.

 

Spies are Us

Thanks, I reckon you are right. I am probably getting paranoid over nothing! Apart from the slight hiccup with IE7 (which I don't really use anyway) it seems to be OK. It's just that I kept hearing so much about Spybot I thought I must be missing something. I think Spybot must be fashionable at the moment. I am pretty sure if there was anything untoward in my computer Norton & Defender would have fixed it.

Cheers anyway mate.