Windows Defender is a free antispyware software (it comes with Windows XP and Vista) that is supposed to protect your pc against spyware. But why do so many people choose other third party software? Today it's time to reveal 10 reasons that make Microsoft's program not good enough to deliver effective protection.

1. Windows Defender allows too much spyware to evade it. It's not that we dreamed about this last night: sources that are notorious worldwide have performed tests revealing this. Just check the links bellow and you'll see the truth:

   PC Mag: "It runs a little slowly, and in a quick test against the popular spyware tool Ad-Aware, it was beaten hands down."

   ZDNet: "Windows Defender missed half of the spyware on our test machine, and didn't fully remove half of the spyware samples in our tests."

   PC Advisor: "According to Australian testing company, Enex Testlab, in full scanning mode Windows Defender could only pick up 53.3 percent of an unspecified list of malware threats thrown at it."

   ...which leads us to point two:

2. Besides the fact that Microsoft’s antispyware tool simply allows malicious content to pass its filters, Windows Defender also has problems removing the junk it finds.
3. Daily updates? No way! Currently, the updates to Windows Defender's spyware definitions database are issued weekly, sometimes even biweekly!! There are approximately 3000 new traces of spyware every month! That is 100 new spyware junk every day! You cannot wait 2 weeks to get signature updates!!
4. Help? This is a dead end! While troubleshooting my network card in Vista, I tried the Help feature. The point where I got stuck was an advice that sounded like "if this doesn't work..try again". Unfortunately, this happens with Windows Defender's Help too.
5. If you don't get enough help from the program's documentation, you can use your two free support incidents but Microsoft qualifies the incidents as "installation, configuration, definition update, detection, and removal errors." After that, you will have to pay 35$ each time you call Microsoft for help.
6. Too many error messages! Just think about having to face notifications about definitions being out of date, despite the fact that the last update was made one or two hours before!
7. Windows Defender is not that user friendly as it should be. It would be really nice to have an option to change the interface to "Classic Windows XP" style, because the new Vista approach to the graphical user interface may not be better for some (a lot of) people.
8. Missing scanning features? Oh, yes! I am not talking about the basic ones, but getting detailed reports through email would be an interesting addition. After all, we're talking about a Microsoft product here!
9. How many spyware signatures are there in Windows Defender’s database? Most antispyware programs display the signatures as a "badge of courage", but to find Windows Defender’s signatures it's not easy at all (you’ll have to check Security Updates, if my memory serves me right).
10. Windows Defender can have compatibility issues with certain programs you install, and the result can be - as expected - a lot of errors..and headaches.

Conclusion

You need to have at least one more antispyware software besides Windows Defender. Because there’s no ultimate antispyware solution (but there are several good applications out there) we recommend using 2: one for scanning and one for real time protection (of course, you could use them both for scanning).

Our Recommendations:

There’s no such thing as the best or the perfect antispyware solution. Everyone has different needs, a certain budget and a certain level of expertise with computers. However, bellow you can see what were the results when I ran a full system scan with 7 of the most popular spyware removal programs :