I'm running a huge sync job and Microsoft Windows Defender is hogging a ton of memory and creating a lot of disk I/O requests on my drive as well.
I know how to disable Windows Defender but I do not want to reboot my PC while this sync in going on to disable it. I also turned off real-time protection but that did not accomplish freeing the memory up like I expected. I really just need to stop the MsMpEng.exe
application.
Is it possible to temporarily stop Windows Defender application and then start it again without needing to reboot the PC?
Best Answer
A Step-by-Step Guide to Temporarily Disabling Windows Defender and then Re-Enabling it on Windows 10
Initial One-Time Setup #1 - #4 per PC
1. Make a Windows Defender Folder Exclusion
First to start, create a new folder on your "C" drive or somewhere you can access and name it DefenderExclusions.
Press the Windows Key one time, start typing "Windows Defender" and click it once you see it.
From Windows Defender click on Settings
Go to Windows Defender and in the Exclusions area click the "Add an exclusion option"
2. Download the NoDefender App
Download the NoDefender App and it should save as a zip file named NoDefender.zip.
Open the NoDefender.zip file and then right-click and select Copy on the file within it named NoDefender.exe
Go to the DefenderExclusions folder location you created and setup the Windows Defender Exclusion, right-click and then paste to save the NoDefender.exe into this folder.
3. Create Disable Defender Script
DisableDefender.cmd Script
4. Create Enable Defender Script
EnableDefender.cmd Script
Disabling Windows Defender
When Windows Defender opens, click on the Settings option and be sure the Windows Defender option is selected on the left.
Enabling Windows Defender
Double-click the EnableDefender.cmd batch file saved in the DefenderExclusions location setup previously and give it a few seconds to finish and pop up the Windows Defender app window.
When the Windows Defender app window opens you should notice the Real-time protection is On and the Virus and spyware definitions have a value of Up to date now.
You want to select the Settings option from the Windows Defender app window again.
Turn On Real-Time Protection, Cloud-based Protection, and the Automatic sample submission options.
Now Windows Defender is re-enabled again.
As per the comment:
Testing Results of MsMpEng.exe Before and After Running the Process
Below is a screen shot of the results of the command line of
tasklist | FIND /I "ms"
which shows whether or not the MsMpEng.exe process is running in memory. This process appears to kill the process from memory when it's disabled, and it appears to have it start back up and running in memory when it's enabled.As per the comment:
I went ahead and downloaded the latest version of the NoDefender.exe app and triple-checked the process and it's working just as I wrote about above. If for some reason you do not follow the steps in the order I wrote, then it may not work as I wrote. In particular, you MUST complete the steps defined in the Disabling Windows Defender section for #3 and turn all three of those to Off before you run the NoDefender.exe app disabling process.