How to Enable or Disable Network Scanning in Windows Defender

By Timothy Tibbetts

on 06/15/2023

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Windows Defender has been known to show a bug that returns the error "items skipped during the scan." In this tutorial, we show you how to enable, or disable network scanning, if you're having that problem or you just want to enable or disable network scanning.

For more information on the "items skipped during the scan" bug, see Windows Defender Fails to Scan or Skips Some Files. The tutorial explains how to make the changes with PowerShell or Group Policy Editor.

Enable or Disable Network Scanning With Registry

We created registry files to enable or disable network scanning easily.

Download Enable or Disable Network Scanning in Windows Defender, and extract the two files:

Enable ScanningNetworkFiles.reg
Disable ScanningNetworkFiles.reg

Double-click Enable ScanningNetworkFiles.reg or Disable ScanningNetworkFiles.reg to enable or disable Disable Automatic Maintenance in Windows 10.

Click Yes when prompted by User Account Control.
Click Yes when prompted by Registry Editor.

Click OK when prompted by the Registry Editor.

This tweak is included as part of MajorGeeks Registry Tweaks.

Advanced users can go to ComputerHKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREPoliciesMicrosoftWindows Defender, add a DWORD named DisableScanningNetworkFiles. Value data of 0 enables scanning and 1 disables scanning, or delete the DisableScanningNetworkFiles DWORD.

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