Having CPU-issues while Windows Defender scan your computer? Too bad

Posted in : Security, Windows By Sebastian Stegrin Translate with Google ⟶

2 years ago

This will probably be my first article ever that won’t give you a solution, but just a description of a problem.

One of our customer had issues with CPU being maxed out on some computers when Windows Defender was scanning.

We tried to limit the CPU with the help of the following parameter: -ScanAvgCPULoadFactor

Unfortunately this did not work, and we even re-installed but got the same issue.

Suddenly one user (I can’t actually remember what forum) said he had a Microsoft-ticket regarding this issue too, almost for as long as I worked with this. Microsoft couldn’t help him, but instead they added the following description of this parameter in their documentation:

Note: This is not a hard limit but rather a guidance for the scanning engine to not exceed this maximum on average.
Note: Manually run scans will ignore this setting and run without any CPU limits.
– Set-MpPreference (Defender) | Microsoft Docs

I can’t really describe the frustration I had when I saw this. I got the feeling that they tried to dodge the real issue instead of solving it. That’s why I recommend everyone that are having this issue to report it to Microsoft and ask them to solve it.

If anyone have found another way to solve this please leave a comment down below.

Thank you for reading my article, feel free to contact me on LinkedIn.

Tags : cpu, issue, limit, Windows, Windows Defender