Windows 10: Cannot add exclusions to Microsoft Defender + Defender real-time protection

Hi all,


Three months ago I bought a brand new Dell XPS 15 9500, as it proved to be among the most reliable and powerful mid- to high-end machines on the market for an AI student like myself, with the occasional ability to run powerful models thanks to its GPU. Now, it has 32 GBs of RAM and all the other cool stuff, but ever since I bought it I have been noticing that from time to time it has some rather noticeable slowdowns which make it nearly impossible to use until itallows me to. After browsing around in the Community forums and monitoring the Task Manager activities, I found out that the Antimalware Service Executable has some tremendous peaks in RAM consumption when I try to open files, which make the laptop run so sluggish, which in turn I found out to be related to the real-time monitoring that Windows Defender performs regularly on files before I can access them.


I've looked into many different solutions proposed on the Community website, and the most quoted answers apart from disabling Defender real-time protection altogether, which I don't really fancy seem to be the ones suggesting to put Defender's own folder among folder exclusions and all "trusted" file types among file type exclusions. So I've tried it, but every time I click on theAdd an exclusion button and choose whatever option I may want to exclude enabling Defender to perform the operation, nothing happens. Literally, nothing. There are still no files, folders or file types reported to being excluded by Defender at the moment, and my XPS keeps being sluggish on a daily basis with me helplessly waiting for it to come alive.


FYI, I have Windows 10 Pro installed, with version 20H2 and OS build 19042.630.


Do you know why this is the case and how could I solve either issues?


Thanks,


Federico Minutoli


Step 1: Trying to add exclusions





Step 2: Choosing the right object Defender's own folder, here





Step 3: Checking results or non-results rather



:)