Looking for some education. 1) If running Surfshark (includes antivirus), can you maintain Windows Defender Antivirus (Windows 11)? In the Windows Security settings under “Who’s protecting me?” as shown in screenshot, I can never get the Defender Antivirus to come back online. Even if I disable Surfshark Antivirus, there never appears any settings option to turn it on. So if it’s the case that you can’t turn on Defender Antivirus when you have a third-party AV like Surfshark installed, I wanted to learn why.
Also, 2) if Defender is the better AV than Surfshark, could you point out primarily why? Or vice-versa. Couldn’t make sense of the mixed reviews I found at first glance. Thanks!
1: Simple running 2 AV is bad non needed in worst case they would scan each other all the time and accessed files making your PC go to a crawl. and you cant back enable WD as long as Surfsharks AV is installed it integrated itself into the Security center , sadly surfsharks AV doesnt allow just a On demand install.
In my own tests with 70k samples it wasnt as good either , its a fine AV but there are better solutions.
WD is a better AV for multiple reasons ( on windows ) one being User base , getting Samples to analyze unknown files is one of the biggest recources a AV got , the smaller the user base the less samples , the less analyzed files there are and the more it needs to rely on heuristics (Might be / might be not Detections ).
Avira SDK is also a Less complete AV with less layers of protection , WD is also fully integrated in the OS and is the expected “base line” for most programs to work with.
on android on the other hand Surfshark AV is pretty fine and good.
on discord rarely the Surfshark staff hints at improvements of the AV maybe their own engine down the line or better back end / features.
Their anti-virus bloat is one of the reasons why I left them… instead of making a really good, reliable, stable, set-n-forget VPN, they decided to bloat their offer with stuff that no-one asked for, and def. stuff that I don’t need.
In my particular case, I couldn’t get SurfShark to automatically connect on my MacBook when I logged in.
And after numerous e-mails about it, I gave up and cancelled my subscription.
