Turn Defender Real-Time Protection On and Off

Defender.md

Defender's real time protection can significantly slow down disk and IO bound operations on Windows, so if you're doing disk intensive work or stress tests I find turning off Defenders Real Time Protection can improve performance drastically.

The following Powershell script provides a quick way to turn Powershell Real Time protection on and off quickly. Dump this file into a folder on your path to quickly turn.

##################################################
# Turn Defender Real Time Monitoring off

# turns defender real time monitoring -on or -off 
# Has to run under an Admin prompt
#
# Syntax:
#
#    Defender        - turns Monitoring off (default)
#    Defender -off   - turns Monitoring off
#    Defender -on    - turns Monitoring on
##################################################


param(
    [switch] $on = $false,
    [switch] $off = $false
)

$setTo = $true;

if ($on.Equals($true)) {
    $setTo = $false
}
if ($off.Equals($true)) {
    $setTo = $true
}

Write-Host "Defender Real Time Protection"

if ($setTo.equals( $true)) {
    "Set to: Off"
}
else {
    "Set to: On"
}

Set-MpPreference -DisableRealtimeMonitoring $setTo

# Delay to let the settings take
Start-Sleep -MilliSeconds 1000

$defenderOptions = Get-MpComputerStatus
if($defenderOptions) {
    $setting = "On"
    if (-not $defenderOptions.RealTimeProtectionEnabled ) {
        $setting = "Off"
    }
    Write-Host  "Actual Setting: "  $setting
}

Additional things you should do:

• Create Exclusion Folders in Defender
  • Development folders
  • Development Tools folders (Visual Studio, MSBuild, Resharper)