Windows Defender...

[gshaw]

Is it worth leaving on my new images now Sophos has the adware scanner built in? Always wondered if Defender actually does anything, thought it went downhill after they noob'ed the interface \ program after the Microsoft Antispyware beta but put it on as an extra layer of defence.

Group Policy Templates for it aren't that useful so beginning to wonder if it's worth it, your opinions?

[Michael]

Windows Defender (in practice) is more suitable to home users and not so much domain users. If a computer is badly infected with spyware, it's far easier to re-image the machine rather than remove the spyware manually.

And as you mentioned, Sophos comes with spyware detection tools, which aren't brilliant, but because Sophos is easy to manage centrally I would stick with this. To my knowledge, there isn't a central console to manage workstations with Windows Defender installed.

[Geoff]

MS Antispyware doesn't seem very effective these days. Sophos PUA scanning picks up a lot of things here, however annoyingly a lot of it appears to be 'techie' tools that (granted can be used for evil) are just tools to help us do a paticular task.

Basically we use Sophos here, but we're very careful about exceptions. It's highly annoying when it deletes some .exe from your netlogin share because it's a 'hacking' tool.