Nevertheless, there are several situations where you might want to completely disable Windows Defender on your PC, at least for a while:
- To use other software different antivirus (this is usually the main reason to disable it forever).
- To run a program that goes into conflict with antivirus built into Windows.
- because you have a security lock in some software.
- because it gives you performance issues.
Anyway, and as we mentioned before, disabling Windows Defender is “hard” because the normal way of doing it only lets you do it temporarily, and the next time you turn on the PC, it will be reactivated just to protect you.
How to permanently disable the built-in antivirus
First of all, you should know that performing this task involves touching Windows files and registries, and if you’re wrong, the damage could be irreversible. Therefore, the first thing we have to tell you is to do this under your responsibilitywe don’t actually recommend disabling Windows Defender.
That being said, the first thing to do is change the Windows settings, otherwise the changes you make to the registry will not be saved. We take Windows 11 as an example, and what you need to do is click Start and type “Windows Security” to open the options window.
In the window that opens, you need to select “Antivirus & threat protection” on the left side, and under “Antivirus & threat protection settings” you need to click “Manage settings”. A new window will appear where you need to scroll down almost to the bottom and uncheck the “Tamper Protection” option.
We can now move on to the next step, which is to open the Windows Registry Editor. To do this, right-click on the Start button and select Run (or just press the WIN+R key combination) and type “regedit” without the quotes. Click OK and the Windows Registry Editor window will open.
In the window that opens, you need to navigate on the left side to the following registry key, although you can also write (or paste) the same in the top bar:
EquipoHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindows Defender
Even if you see that there is a folder called “Policy Manager”, do not click on it, the one we are interested in is the one called Windows Defender, which should be empty on the right side except for this key called (By default ) . If you see there is a registry key called “DisableAntiSpyware” perfect, otherwise we will have to create it ourselves.
To do this, right-click on an empty area on the right and select New -> DWORD (32-bit) Value.
Next, you will need to change its name; make sure it’s called DisableAntiSpyware exactly, including capitals. Now you need to right-click on it and select “Edit”, at which point a small window will open. Here you need to change the “Value data” field from 0 to 1 and click OK.
Once done, you need to close the registry editor and restart the PC. Windows Defender will have already been disabled and in fact if you tried to access this tool you should get an error telling you that the app has been disabled due to group policies, but if not case and some components have been enabled, you will need to repeat what you did before, but create the following registry keys along with the DisableAntiSpyware one, all as follows:
- DisableRealtimeMonitoring (value 1).
- DisableRoutineklyTakingAction (value 1).
- DisableAntiVirus (value 1).
- DisableSpecialRunningModes (value 1).
- ServiceKeepAlive (value 0).
With that, Windows Defender should have been completely disabled permanently, although if you want to re-enable it, just go back to the registry editor and delete all those keys you created (and restart the PC, of course ) .
