Category: Security

Recently, Windows defender antivirus has become very hard to disable in Windows 10 (And probably 11), previously, you would disable tamper protection, then open gpedit.msc, navigate to the setting and voila, recently, doing this o longer works, now, as soon as you close group policy editor (gpedit.msc) and open it again, the setting to disable windows defender antivirus pops up again ! You were also abe to do this from the registry, which does not work now.

So, it turns out that you need the following extra steps now, So here are the complete instructions

1- Start as you would by disabling tamper protection, you can do that by going to “Windows security”, then Virus and threat protection, then click on the “Manage settings” button, and finally disable tamper protection

2- Create a file with the .REG extension containing the following and execute it !

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\SecurityHealthService]
"Start"=dword:00000004

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\wscsvc]
"Start"=dword:00000004

Now execute the above, if it does not work because “binary values can only be edited manually”, then you will need to visit the locations above in regedit (Run as administrator) and switch the values of both to (4) which means disabled

Now before proceeding to the following procedure (The same OLD procedure), You will need to restart your computer for the settings above to take effect

• Run gpedit.msc as administrator
• Computer configuration => Administrative templates => Windows Components => Microsoft defender antivirus
• Now, you should find the entry “Turn off Microsoft defender antivirus”, double click it, and select Enable then okay
• Restart your computer again

A message still appears urging me to enable it, Click the three dots at the top of that message and disable this notification so that you won’t accidentally re-enable antivirus by clicking the message

I am not that great with windows, a look at all the posts on this blog will tell you that, Now with that said, I need to lock my laptop (Windows !) after a few minutes of inactivity.

Step 1/3: Check if you have Security policy installed

Windows 11 HOME shipped without this tool, as it came in the pro and the enterprise. to figure out if you have the tool, Hit start and start typing secpol.msc, if all you see is a suggestion to do a web search instead of an Application, you do not have it, the next step will explain how to install it, If it is indeed there, you can skip step 2 and go to step 3 right away

Step 1/2: Installing GroupPolicy

You only need to do this if in the step above it turned out that Group Policy is not installed on your system.

To Install/Enable Local Security Policy (secpol.msc), you will need to install Group Policy, to get that directly from Microsoft, you can run the following script as administrator (Download link also provided gpedit-enabler.bat), this is courtesy of Major Geeks

@echo off 
@echo "This batch file from MajorGeeks.Com will enable Group Policy Editor (Gpedit.msc) on Windows 10 Home."
@echo "If this method fails, there are other methods to try at https://tinyurl.com/majorgeeksgpedit"
pushd "%~dp0" 

dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~3*.mum >List.txt 
dir /b %SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~3*.mum >>List.txt 

for /f %%i in ('findstr /i . List.txt 2^>nul') do dism /online /norestart /add-package:"%SystemRoot%\servicing\Packages\%%i" 
pause

Step 3/3: Modify security policy to lock screen after 20 minutes

To do that, you run secpol.msc, then look for 

Local Policies > Security Options “Interactive Logon: Machine inactivity limit” and set that to 1200 (20 minutes), 

then restart the computer

and there you have it, the windows login screen will appear after 20 minutes of inactivity, you don’t need to set a screensaver or even connect this to your screen timeout (which is 10 minutes in my case)

Notes about the installation

Running the above batch file as administrator should result in the following being printed.

"This batch file from MajorGeeks.Com will enable Group Policy Editor (Gpedit.msc) on Windows 10 Home."
"If this method fails, there are other methods to try at https://tinyurl.com/majorgeeksgpedit"

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~ar-SA~10.0.22621.1
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.22621.1
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.521
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.608
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~ar-SA~10.0.22621.1
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~ar-SA~10.0.22621.608
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.22621.457
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.22621.608
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.457
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.

Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool
Version: 10.0.22621.1

Image Version: 10.0.22621.608

Processing 1 of 1 - Adding package Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.608
[==========================100.0%==========================]
The operation completed successfully.
Press any key to continue . . .

In addition to the above, A file should be produced in the same folder as the batch file named List.txt, in my case, the file had the following contents

Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~ar-SA~10.0.22621.1.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.22621.1.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.521.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientExtensions-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.608.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~ar-SA~10.0.22621.1.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~ar-SA~10.0.22621.608.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.22621.457.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~en-US~10.0.22621.608.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.457.mum
Microsoft-Windows-GroupPolicy-ClientTools-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~10.0.22621.608.mum