Sat 6 May 2006
Microsoft Antispyware is the previous name for this utility which you may already be familiar with.
In essence it is a handy piece of free software which sits in your system tray (down by the clock) and monitors what is trying to install itself onto your computer. When it spots something it is unsure about it prompts you to see if you want to allow it to continue installing, or if the offending program should be blocked. This has saved me a few times from rogue websites trying to change my internet settings or homepage, and the occasional piece of spyware which is sometimes hidden in some innocent-looking freeware, as i’ve found out in the past.
Windows Defender, new name, new features?
Following the automatic upgrade of my working version of Microsoft Antispyware to the new Windows Defender, the new program has been unable to download any definitions - definitions it needs to work properly, so i am now left without any spyware defences!
Hopefully Microsoft will release an improved version soon which doesn’t suffer from these glitches, but for now my recommendation is decline the automatic update when prompted, and don’t rush into trying Windows Defender.
June 18th, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Update: I figured out why Windows Defender was failing to download its updates correctly. It turns out Windows Defender shares some registry keys with SUS (Microsofts utility for patching multiple windows machines from a central location whilst only downloading the patches once to save bandwidth etc).
Whilst it is good that Windows Defender now works as expected, it is disappointing that the installer for Defender did not take this into account - what with Defender and SUS both been Microsoft products!
The good news is that WSUS (the successor to SUS) doesnt have this incompatibility, and with SUS support officially discontinued from July 2006 it is unlikely the SUS-Defender conflict should be causing disruption for much longer.