Rip
09-20-2006, 02:10 PM
Recently a reoccurring problem I've seen cropped up again. For those of you who are familiar with Windows Defender, there's a good chance you've seen this issue. For whatever reason, defender just does not want to update the spyware definitions. This could lead to a lot of issues, and its a very common problem. In fact, I've run into it on over 3/4 of the XP computers i've seen running defender, and now even with me running on vista, the same issue cropped up. Previously there wasn't much one could do, with microsoft so tightly integrating the concept of automatic updates, finding a manual update seemed next to impossible. In fact it is this very issue that has turned me from a strong advocate of Microsoft antisypware into one who really doesn't like to recommend defender for the everyday user. And when dozens of people ask me for tech help with their computers, it starts to add up. The general consensus amongst other technically inclined people seems to be along the same lines, defender has become just too much of a pain to work with, ad-aware and spybot have returned to the top of the freebee choice list.
For all of you who are running into this issue with defender, and the MS default troubleshooting page is not working, you can get your manual definition updates from the defender newsgroup stuff. http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/newsgroups/reader/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.private.security.spyware .signatures
(yea go ahead pass the link around, better to have everyone up to date)
So when it comes to security, I really do like defender / MS antispyware, its a great concept. I just am really disappointed with the implementation. So this discussion topic is twofold. First off, have you run into the update problem with defender? Second do you think they really need to update the software to actually get updates properly, or are we asking too much from a free program? If you have any more thoughts on the subject, or know any logistical issues they're having please feel free to chime in, and I hope a few of you running defender will take advantage of getting the definitions up to date.
For all of you who are running into this issue with defender, and the MS default troubleshooting page is not working, you can get your manual definition updates from the defender newsgroup stuff. http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/newsgroups/reader/default.mspx?dg=microsoft.private.security.spyware .signatures
(yea go ahead pass the link around, better to have everyone up to date)
So when it comes to security, I really do like defender / MS antispyware, its a great concept. I just am really disappointed with the implementation. So this discussion topic is twofold. First off, have you run into the update problem with defender? Second do you think they really need to update the software to actually get updates properly, or are we asking too much from a free program? If you have any more thoughts on the subject, or know any logistical issues they're having please feel free to chime in, and I hope a few of you running defender will take advantage of getting the definitions up to date.