Although you should not be performing this sort of disabling of a built in windows service unless you know what you are doing. The purpose of the Windows Defender is to help from malicious software from taking hold of your computer. Basically blocking it from installing in most cases. However this is not a service that plays well with many serious anti-malware programs and most certainly shouldn't be used as your only line of defense against them. In fact, this is probably the first service I disable on my client computers for the simple fact I know how useless it is! Note: if you are already a client of mine, please contact me if you are wanting this to be disabled. So here is how it is done:
- Go to Run.
- Type in ‘gpedit.msc’ (without quotes) and hit Enter. This will open up a new menu, where group policy editor options are listed.
- Head to the ‘Administrative Templates’ tab, located under ‘Computer Configuration’.
- Click ‘Windows Components’, followed by ‘Windows Defender’.
- Find the ‘Turn off Windows Defender’ option, and double-click it.
- Apply your changes before exiting the GPE menu
Note: The above only works on PRO/Enterprise versions. If you want to do this on a HOME version you will need to edit the registry and for that I suggest using these instructions.
