Windows 10: Defender not Running Regular Scan

@Bree
Can you do a screenshot of your General tab please mate?

Thanks

 

@Jeddie, as requested...





...and, FYI last night the PC was left on overnight and completed another automatic scan:

 

I fixed this problem by making a task from scratch in the Task Scheduler Library folder in Task Scheduler. Just set it up to run "C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MpCmdRun.exe" Scan -Schedulejob, and works every time I tested it. Is there any problems with doing it this way?

 

No but you should disable the auto maintenance scan task otherwise it will try to run as well. Find that one in Task Scheduler Library>Microsoft>Windows>Windows Defender. Third task.

 

I had to do the same thing - create a scheduled task to perform a scan. Its working ok.

 

This was reported quite a while ago. If you want to reliably run a Defender scan in Win 10 AU you need to create a task. As I said above, if you did create a manual task you should disable the automatic maintenance task otherwise you will have scans running too often,

 

But the reason I created the scheduled task is because automatic maintenance is not working. So I won't have tasks running too often.
If auto maintenance worked I wouldn't bother with a manual task.

 

It will work, but only if the specific conditions are met.

 

It does not work. Refer post #46.
The other 3 auto tasks run, but, the auto task for scheduled maintenance does not run.

 

I worked on this issue on another forum and know exactly what the issue is. If you've got it working how you want that's what counts. But I am fairly confident that the auto scan would run if given the right conditions. And my advice to disable the auto maintenance scan if you have created a manual task is good.

 

After I enabled the task, I just assumed it was running..
Until just half an hour ago when I noticed it hadn't been running for over a month (on my server, of all things! And -ONLY- on my server)

Any attempts to make it run normally failed.. But I finally solved it
Instead of having it run the actual program, I had it run a bat file with the one line:
@"C:\Program Files\Windows Defender\MpCmdRun.exe" Scan -ScheduleJob

Now it suddenly works perfectly (for all the test I've done since I figured this out 15 minutes ago, mind you!)

I also set it to not only run at a specific time, but also upon login. Not sure if connecting through RDP counts as a login.

I hope this helps, I registered to post this.. And I hope it helps.
I'll keep an eye on it and update this post in a week, or if things fail to run..

 

Thought I would re-visit my original post from 2016.

Well Defender still does not run regularly on my desktop. It might run after a windows update. But certainly not regularly as part of automatic maintenance.

I continue to get the 0x2 error in Task Scheduler for 'Windows Defender Regular Scan'. All other auto maintenance tasks run ok.

I live in hope this will be solved by somebody one day????

 

I created a scheduled task to run a quick scan on all my computers which does seem to run pretty reliably. Although after a major update it sometimes may not. If so I delete the scheduled task and create a new one and that seems to work. What's funny is I have disabled the scan as part of maintenance yet that still runs too. Though not reliably. So on some days I get multiple scans run.

 

After both an in place upgrade to 16299.19 on a Home laptop and a clean install on a PRO desktop, I found while the scan task still runs fine with the usual 'The operation completed successfully, (0x0)', the other Defender task to update the definitions - '../MpCmdRun.exe -signatureUpdate' - is now occasionally returning this lone '(0x2)' message.

Oddly when I ran the task manually as a test, it failed every other attempt, as if it were getting a busy signal. However checking the last few days, it's been (0x0) fine.

I have notice Windows still feels the need to run a scan on it's own whenever it feels like it. Usually after some new definition signatures have come in via the normal daily WU cycle. purely speculating that it thinks they've been sitting around untested too long as I've noticed concurrently the Defender tray icon gets the yellow '!' warning sign. And I have the Defender's scans set to notify me in the Action Window. where at that the end of the week I'll get a 'Scan Summary', often noting as many as 9 scans in the 7 day cycle.

Of course this was all a much bigger issue for me in the earlier versions of Windows when even the 'quick' scans were taking 10 times longer to run than now which is but a minute or two.