Windows Server 10 – How to Disable Windows Defender

[floated align=”left”]Windows Server 10[/floated] The new Windows Server OS Technical Preview is released and one of the surprises waiting for you is that it comes out of the box with Windows Defender installed and enabled.
There are two main reasons for the surprise:

• The previous OS version – Server 2012 R2 doesn’t include a malware solution (except Server Core)
• Windows Defender user interface is not installed by default on Windows Server 10

You can still manage Windows Defender options, but as you can guess, this is performed in PowerShell. Alternatively, you can install use the GUI for Windows Defender. Finally, if you are planning to use a different malware solution or you don’t want the compromise the performance of the system, you can uninstall this feature.

In the following short video, we demonstrate:

• How to disable or enable temporarily Windows Defender in PowerShell
• How to install and use Windows-Defender-GUI
• How to completely remove Windows Defender from Windows Server 10

For your convenience, we provide the PowerShell commands that we are using in the demo:

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Windows 10 Server Preview – How to Disable Windows Defender
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# Get information about Server roles and features that are available or installed
Get-WindowsFeature
# Turn-off real-time protection
Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $true
# Check real-time protection status
Get-MpPreference | FL *RealtimeMonitoring
# Turn-on real-time protection
Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $false
# Install Windows Defender GUI (no restart required)
Install-WindowsFeature Windows-Defender-GUI
# Uninstall Windows Defender and its GUI (restart required)
Remove-WindowsFeature Windows-Defender, Windows-Defender-GUI

You can download the [tip label=”Text File with Commands” style=”1″ href=”https://www.netometer.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/Disable-Uninstall-Windows-10-Defender-Server-10.txt”]PowerShell Commands text [/tip].

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