Keeping an antivirus installed and properly updated on our Windows-based computer is almost mandatory today. Microsoft itself has been offering us its security solution with these characteristics by default for a long time, we are referring to Windows Defender.
This is a software that we found only install the operating system as such from scratch. One of the advantages that we find here is that we will not have to resort to other third party antivirus external, which sometimes means significant financial savings. At the same time, this is an antivirus that has not stopped growing and improving over time and increasingly makes more security-related functions available to us.
But despite all this, many users around the world still do not trust this program provided by the software giant. Hence they prefer to disable it in one way or another to use some other external solution. The first thing we must take into consideration is that once we install any other program with these characteristics, Windows Defender is disabled automatically. The main reason for all this is that under no circumstances is it advisable to keep more than one security solution of this type installed and running at the same time.
But to be sure, we can use other more reliable and permanent methods to deactivate Windows Defender, as we will see. Hence precisely, below we are going to talk about a method to carry out this deactivation process in a totally reliable and permanent way.
Disable Windows antivirus from the registry
In the Home editions of Windows, we have the possibility of reliably deactivating this Windows antivirus using the registry editor of the operating system. All we have to do is type the regedit command in the search box on the taskbar. Next, once the corresponding registry editor appears on the screen, all we have to do is go to the following path:
Equipo/HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Policies/Microsoft/Windows Defender
Once here, in the right panel we create the new entry called DisableAntiSpyware of type DWORD (32-bit). We set a value of 1 to it. After restarting the equipment we will see that the windows antivirus is disabled by default.
Use local group policies to remove Windows Defender
It may also happen that we have a Professional or Pro edition of Windows. In this case we also have the possibility of using the local group policies to carry out this deactivation task that we tell you about.
In this specific case, what we do is open a window in the system execution through the Win + R key combination. Here we type the command gpedit.msc and in the window that appears on the screen of the directives editor we go to Configuration / Administrative Templates / Windows Components / Windows Defender Antivirus.
Now we will have the opportunity to disable this security component integrated into the operating system itself definitively. We will have to check the option that says Enabled. It is worth mentioning that this is a change that we can make at any time later.