Sunday, April 14, 2013

Windows Defender … is your PC clean?

I thought my PC was in decent shape. I have run Windows Security Essentials since it came out (I hate paying for virus protection) but I almost never run a full scan. PITA in my opinion.

But today I updated the defender’s database and for the heck of it I ran a full scan, which took something close to 10 hours and looked at almost 22 million files.

What it found is a little frightening … 5 serious threats.

image

image

I was forced to show you the same window twice because this dialog does not expand at all. So you see the last entry in the second version. The dialog must have been written by one of the developers’ 5 year old child to have forgotten that rather basic feature.

Anyway, of course I am going to press the “apply actions” button … to have these cleaned out. And you should do a scan asap and clear your PC too.

By the way … Defender is part of Windows 8 instead of being an add on … another reason to not sneer at this OS.