Defender has the nasty habit of aggressively scanning new games I download off Steam. There are two occasions where it'll do it:
- While it's downloading it seems to scan each chunk. I have a gigabit connection, with defender off I can download at nearly full speed. With it on I can download at about 1MB/s.
- While the game loads a level. For example, the intro level to the new Deus Ex took over 10 minutes to load the first time. At that point I disabled defender entirely and just promised myself I would be careful. Naive, I know, but at least I can play my video games.
Yeah, but if you piss me off enough times I'm exempting all of my hard drives. It hasn't caught a single virus since 2009. I've not found it that hard to stay safe online.
- While it's downloading it seems to scan each chunk. I have a gigabit connection, with defender off I can download at nearly full speed. With it on I can download at about 1MB/s.
- While the game loads a level. For example, the intro level to the new Deus Ex took over 10 minutes to load the first time. At that point I disabled defender entirely and just promised myself I would be careful. Naive, I know, but at least I can play my video games.