Where can I find Windows Defender? You need to know

Windows Defender is Windows' in-house virus protection. Defender takes care of basic malware protection as long as no other antivirus software is installed on your system. Learn how to activate the free protection for your PC on Windows 10.

Enabling Windows Defender - how to find it

Windows Defender is usually automatically enabled if you do not have antivirus software installed on your system. If an antivirus program is present, Windows will automatically turn off Defender. This happens to avoid any complications between the two programs.Follow these steps to manually enable Windows Defender on Windows 10:

1. Click the Windows icon in the taskbar to bring up the Start menu.
2. After that, click the gear icon to open Windows Settings.
3. In the overview, go to the "Update and Security" category. Click on the left in the navigation the item "Windows Security".
4. Then select the option "Virus & Threat Protection".
5. Click on "Options of Windows Defender Antivirus" and activate the slider.

Turn on and off Windows Defender via command prompt

In addition to the system settings, you can also activate the Defender via console. To do this, open the command prompt as administrator and enter the following commands: "sc start WinDefend Enable" and "WdNisSvc Enable". If you want to disable Defender again, this also works via the command prompt with the commands: "sc start WinDefend Disable" and "WdNisSvc Disable".