I had a client come in the other day and she had just purchased some big huge bloated anti virus software solution and was having trouble with Windows Defender interfering with the software. I went ahead and disabled it completely for her and thought I would make a quick post on how to do it.
A client of mine called me in a panic yesterday because a laptop he uses for work got infected with the Personal Security virus. Personal Security is a nasty virus, also sometimes called antispyware or malware, that takes over your computer and attempts to get you to purchase the software. The virus actually makes the end user think that it is legit software and they are only doing you a favor by protecting your computer however this is not the case. Below I describe things that the virus will do to blend in to Windows as well as a method I have discovered as one of the easier ways to remove it.
I recently received a new Dell laptop that has Windows 7 Ultimate 64-Bit as the operating system. A friend and I were discussing virus protection software as well as spyware protection software and how Windows 7 handles each. I am a big fan of Windows Defender so I was looking at the configuration on my Windows 7 computer and realized that the Windows Defender service was not starting. I hadn’t even realized this because I typically turn off the Virus, Spyware, and Firewall messaging that Windows complains about if you don’t have each installed the way the OS wants. So needless to say I was surprised that Windows Defender was stopped. It took me awhile to finally figure out how to resolve and I came across a bunch of issues that others may have so below I describe the error, steps I took to resolve, and final resolution.