A couple great tools for turning off a lot of the Microsoft spying, especially great if you’re running Windows 11. Personally, when they end support for Windows 10 I’ll just switch to Linux as Linux gaming has improved quite a bit and I’ll just make due with what games work on Linux.
This is a informative channel on security, and this was an interesting test between Microsoft Windows Defender vs. Kaspersky. Consequently, Windows defender did alright in the standard test with downloaded malware, but failed with some ransomware where Kaspersky successfully defeated it. Of course, Microsoft Defender did have issues with dealing with so much malware so fast as his scripts were run, but that was unusual conditions.
And this is a good video on if you can trust Kaspersky after the Ukrainian war.
Personally, I don’t use a Windows machine other than gaming or using a couple safe websites. Better to run a Linux virtual machine in VMware Player or Virtualbox which is much safer and insulates online activities from the host system. And I also use Pi-Hole/unbound recursive DNS servers that block a lot of known malware sites. But if you heavily use a Windows machine, Kaspersky though expensive looks to be the best antivirus solution.