I had the same experience. Windows became noticeably faster without antivirus. Also other problems like not downloading large files disappeared too.

Corporate IT says no. :)

I don’t know what’s wrong with my work PC. Home PC also has Windows (because games) and is super fast (even with Defender, but without ATP).

From own experience this is 99% corporate shenanigans.

You should have a serious talk with your IT department. Sometimes they are not aware how much garbage they are throwing at people through Active Directory.

In my experience, the best way around such issues is to force IT to dogfood their own system instead of having special laptops for IT employees.

Oh, they do know. And they do dogfood. We only have 70 employees. IT doesn’t program though.

Also, in my experience, many people just don’t care. I understand, too. It’s just easier this way. Not caring is great for your mental health.

If most of your colleagues feel the state of things is tolerable, nothing will change.

If you like me hate hearing the fan on an idle laptop, you need to learn the subtle art of nagging IT just the right amount to get things done :)

Or just BYOD :)

For the IT department it's a tradeoff though; they'd rather have everyone be inconvenienced or their hardware not working at 100% than to risk a virus wreaking havoc on their networks, or ransomware crippling their whole organization. Even without the restricted Windows machines they struggle with enough shit already, because people can't behave on company hardware on the one hand, and every employee is a target.

This is such a huge pain, I keep having to turn off the antivirus because it will often slow "npm i" so much that it'll just fall over and report a crash. I shouldn't have to disable my built-in antivirus just to do basic development!