I have disabled all "Windows protector" anti virus features, at least as far as Microsoft will admit to me when I use the Action Center tray icon to disable it.
However I still see MsMpEng.exe
running, it consumed 100% of my disk bandwidth for 7 minutes at boot time, and even sometimes I see MsMpCmd.exe
running on my machine. Is microsoft lying to me? Do they run their tools even when you tell them not to? Is there a secondary way to actually disable this stuff?
Windows Defender service is Enabled in the services panel (services.msc), and Microsoft seems to try to prevent you from disabling it. From an administrator command prompt "sc stop WinDefend" and "net stop WinDefend" return "Access is denied". That's microsoft speak for "this is our computer, piddly human, kindly do not interfere with our use of it".
Update: From my googling, it seems the only known way is to boot to Linux and rename the "c:\Program Files\Windows Defender" folder.