Regarding the last point.
Windows Defender will normally be active by default on Windows 10 unless you go out of your way to turn it off.
Re:Windows for Linux Nerds
by hypervis0r on Thursday September 14, 2017 @01:31PM
(#15250320)
It's not like editing a value in the registry is "going out of your way", it's almost standard Windows practice by now.
* Do you have active snapshots (vssadmin list shadows)? Halves random writes to disk in the worst case.
* Do you have USN journaling enabled (fsutil usn queryjournal c:)? Adds extra IO to meta-data operations.
* NTFS/FAT is optimized for fast directory listing speed so modifying files also modifies directory entries. Nothing one can do about that (except being aware of that and designing programs with this in mind).
* Windows doesn't keep as much dirty fs data in fs-cache. I know of no way to change that. One can probably, if one uses a Windows Server OS.
* Is a on-access Virus scanner active? If yes, one cannot compare performance to Linux. It's a massive bottleneck.