Windows Defender Offline

[hazelnut]

After reading about this new beta tool from Microsoft I decided to give it a run to see how it works.

 

Using my Windows 7 machine I downloaded the 64 bit version from the download page here.

 

http://windows.micro...efender-offline

 

Double-clicked the installer which asked me the usual agreement things and then asked where did I want to put it. I chose cd and after putting in the disk I had to do nothing at all until Windows ejected the disk as ready for use. (Windows 7 burns iso disks without the need for any third party tools)

 

Then I rebooted my laptop with the Defender startup disc in the drive. It booted outside of Windows with the usual 'loading windows files' progress bar along the bottom of the screen. It then had this crazy little moving progress bar in the middle of the screen which takes quite a few minutes to load all the files so don't be tempted to abort thinking it isn't working.

 

 

Then the program loads and is instantly recognizable as the Security Essentials screen but called Defender. I believe that this is because in Windows 8 that is what it will be. I ran a quick scan and then at the end closed down using the X in top corner. This also reboots the PC which is handy.

 

I was really impressed with this, giving people the chance to deal with things when the PC won't boot because of nasties, or won't allow anything to run on the desktop.

 

Points to note... You can download any 'bitness' of Windows on your machine and make a disk but the one you download must match the 'bitness' on the machine you are going to use it on.

 

If you choose to download to usb instead to make it bootable it will wipe USB clean first. Also usb's can be reused as they can update, cd's cannot update themselves.

 

FAQ's

 

http://windows.micro...der-offline-faq

[Nergal]

Nice Find as Always, I hadn't heard of this yet.