McAfee and Windows Defender

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Sorry if this topic's been done before - I'm not too familiar with this section of the site....

Anyway, the McAfee protection system on my Windows 8.1 desktop PC recently stopped working properly, and for some reason it proved impossible, once the defective version had been removed, to successfully reinstall it, even with the help of the very experienced technical assistance department of BT (my internet provider). What they did was to activate 'Windows Defender', the default security package included with the computer, with the assurance that this would provide perfectly adequate anti-virus and anti-malware protection.

It seems that Windows Defender, in its Windows 8 incarnation, is indeed a very much beefed-up version of its predecessors, but is it really adequate to deal with all the threats out there on the net? One of my laptops, also a Windows 8.1 machine, has been operating for the last year or so with only this system as protection, and hasn't met with any mishaps by the way.

Also I have heard from some quarters that systems like McAfee and Norton are pretty poor, and not worth subscribing to anyway. Is that a fair assessment? All opinions welcome.

If you use common sense online, Microsoft Security Essentials/Defender is good enough, I find. Then again, I also run uBlock Origin, NoScript, and sometimes Peerblock.