The other change you’ll notice is the disappearance of the Cylance icon and the appearance of the Defender icon in your taskbar. While you have the ability to postpone the reboot, you should plan to reboot shortly after the prompt appears. You will be prompted to reboot following the changes. The task will activate Microsoft Defender and uninstall Cylance.

Beginning May 15, 2023, the installation task will be released to all Windows computers currently reporting to our client management software. We do not anticipate any impact on your computer’s performance during the process or following. The good news is that the installation of the new software and removal of Cylance will occur behind the scenes. Due to technical issues, the deployment for macOS will be scheduled during the upcoming academic year. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint is an industry-leading, cloud-powered endpoint security solution that helps to secure against ransomware, file-less malware, and other sophisticated attacks on Windows and macOS devices. In fact, we recommend everyone also use a good anti-malware and anti-exploit app like MalwareBytes in addition to antivirus-it’ll help protect you from against exploits and vulnerabilities that antivirus apps don’t cover, which are arguably more prevalent on the web today.All SMU Windows computers will transition from using CylancePROTECT to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint as an anti-malware application during the summer of 2023. If you really hate antivirus, Windows Defender is the least intrusive program you can use-so you should probably leave it on. Many people will tell you that you can go without antivirus if you’re careful, and that just isn’t true. While it’s handy being able to enable and disable Windows Defender, please do make sure that you’re still running a good antivirus app.

RELATED: Do I Really Need Antivirus If I Browse Carefully and Use Common Sense? Make Sure You’re Still Using Antivirus (and Anti-Malware) Plus, Defender takes up very little disk space and there are better ways to free up disk space on Windows. Second, if you stop the service-or go through the process of uninstalling it-any Windows update is likely to restore Windows Defender and undo all that work anyway.

Is windows defender a good antivirus