Hello folks. I have been a long time BitDefender user, but when I installed it onto my Windows 8 64 bit partition, I started to experience severe performance issues. I worked with BitDefender for over a month but was never able to resolve my issues. Uninstalling it resolved all my performance issues. So … after uninstalling BD I went to enable Windows Defender from within Action Center and the option is grayed out. Downloaded the BD uninstaller, ran it and rebooted. Still can’t enable WD. Searched the registry for any instance of BD and found no entries, so the uninstaller did a good job. I tried to enable WD from within Services.msc, but get a message similar to “it’s been disabled by another AV product.” BD support sent me a link after I complained, and it basically told me to go to Action Center, yada, yada, yada, everything I had already done. As a stop gap measure I am running AVG free, but at this point, I’d rather use the low resource Windows Defender. 50% of the time, I use my laptop on battery and offline for my business where I run some programs for a half-hour, put it in hibernation mode, and then resume, multiple times a day. I can’t afford the slowdowns from the AV products every time I restart or resume. Does anyone have any ideas on how to track down the root cause of what is disabling Windows Defender? All Internet searches so far have been dead ends. I really hate the idea of doing a refresh or a reload as I have many proprietary software packages that will require making phone calls to reset my accounts as they are locked to 1 PC and to specific hardware. Any assistance or suggestions would be VERY gratefully appreciated.
Sincerely,
A long time loyal Windows Secrets (formerly Langa List) reader, supporter and prior contributor.
