Well Windows Defender/antimalware service exe is officially in la garbage after pushing my 6700K CPU to 99% every time I open Chrome or change tabs. No gpedit could change that, what the h--. Firefox was ditched too, due to periodic "firefox exe was blocked from accessing graphics hardware" crashes and spams of WHEA loggers in event viewer. I can't get the latest GPU drivers right now due to corruption/memory leak, screen artifacts at startup and dragging boot/shutdown.
GPU is fine to diagnostics. Windows Defender: take it or leave it. For sure! Even with decent hardware in this instance!
So, demoing F-Secure Safe which so far, is really pleasant and unobtrusive on here, and gaming mode is OFF. Idle means idle--0% cpu, disk and gpu. No impact I could see on startup, shutdown and especially Chrome. Anyone else share this opinion? ESET is a bit expensive.....
Edit: Wow, I'm reading this, very drama-filled, sorry.