Do I need additional antivirus protection for Windows 11?

Robert Zanatta said:

You could do the usual system file checks using SFC and DISM to ensure no problems with them.

You could try another Microsoft safety scanner utility to see if it finds a virus (one they might affect Defender’s operation):

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/intelligence/safety-scanner-download

Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions Robert.

I am running a Safety Scan now. I thought when I kicked it off I pointed it at the C:\users folder, but it has been running now for almost 30 minutes and checked over 2M files (which is way more than I expected under C:\users) and so far says 31 files infected. I will have to wait until it's done to see which files those are.



The progress bar is not an absolute - it fills up to 100% and then resets to 0 and starts again, and cycles and cycles. So no idea how far it has really gone or has to go.

At a glance I am not sure how to make use of DISM - seems like a big hammer for a single task. I've bookmarked the webpage for further study. Same with SFC,

BTW, this Safety scan is still running and it nowhere near pounds the CPUs like the antivirus scans did. I still plan to have a chat with Microsoft Support once I get my thoughts clear.

Peter

OK, here is weirdness. The Safety Scan seemed to stall - did nothing. It got to this point...



I assumed (possibly incorrectly) that it was hung on the file shown. So I tracked that file down, decided it was old and I didn't need it, and deleted it. Then I noticed that the Scan did finish. I went looking for information of the 36 infected files and...



nothing. Did the scan hang or was I just impatient? Did me deleting that questionable file release the scan, or was it merely a coincidence? Weird or what?

Peter

I did the Error checking of each drive using the File Explorer -> Properties -> Tools menu and did the scan regardless that I was informed that I did not need to. And all drives came back fine.

I then decided to try SFC in verifyonly mode and it did report some "integrity violations".



I tried to read the log file but man there was a lot of technical noise in the file ... 362 KB of jibberish (to me).

I guess I will rerun sfc for real and see what it does.

This link might help with details on using SFC and DISM as well as what SFC might log and what to look for in the log.

Robert Zanatta said:

This link might help with details on using SFC and DISM as well as what SFC might log and what to look for in the log.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us...em-files-79aa86cb-ca52-166a-92a3-966e85d4094e

Click to expand...

Thanks Robert.

I used the findstr command to grep the lines of interest from the CBS.log, but it did not find anything specific. Just these three lines of text repeated over and over, with the timestamp varying.



I might run sfc /verifyonly again to see if the problems still exist.

UPDATE: arun of sfc /verifyonly came back clean this time.

Last time I got a (detected) virus infection was at middle 1990s from a contamined floppy disk from a friend, so almost 25 years ago. Last detected virus was at the beginning 2000s .

My first defense line is to have care on sites I browse and e-mails I receive (previously also removable data media).

I always had some commercial anti-virus but since MS released their own antivirus (I think) 15 years ago, I jumped to them, even they received constant bashing from the masses in the net, mainly in their first years - but it shown good enough for me.

No infection. No detected virus so far.

Regards,