The firewall has its own interface – effective, if a little old-fashioned – where you can open ports, configure notifications and set different settings for private and public networks. The interface here feels dated, which is annoying even if scheduled scans aren’t particularly necessary for most users. Scheduling scans requires you to leave the interface and use Windows’ Event Manager.

You can manually update virus definitions and enable or disable options such as cloud-based protection and real-time protection – this isn’t a good idea for the safety of your PC, though. Virus and threat protection is home to your usual quick, full and custom scans, plus an intensive offline scan mode to tackle hard-to-remove threats. It also has dedicated tabs for different features. Microsoft Defender Antivirus and its companion features can be found in the Windows Security Centre, which helpfully opens on a home screen with an overview of your protection status, including when Defender last updated itself and scanned for malware. Includes 5GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage.Microsoft Defender’s impact on system performance is likely to be unnoticeable on reasonably well-specified PCs, but tests show that using it in favour of third-party software won’t provide the kind of performance boost you might hope for. It’s even being trialled for macOS under the name Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Mac, although the focus there is primarily to serve mixed-OS business environments. Microsoft Defender Antivirus – the default virus protection built into Windows 10 and 11 – has gone from strength to strength in recent years, and its performance in recent tests by multiple independent firms has been conspicuously good. Parental controls Provides content filtering, app restrictions, and time limits for younger members of the household.

Built into Windows 10/11: If you already have Windows 10 or Windows 11 installed, then you should be able to start using it right away without further downloads.

Windows defender review