Windows Smartscreen for Windows 8,8.1 and 10 is a feature that is supposed to help you keep your PC safer in instances where you are about to interact with an unrecognized and/or potentially hazardous app or site. This feature can either block the suspicious/unknown app or issue a warning about it that the user can choose to ignore. If, however, you want to disable this feature, there is a way to do it and below, we will show you how you can disable it. Note, however, that it is usually not advisable to disable the Windows Smartscreen as it offers you an additional layer of protection that can come in handy in a lot of situations. Also, note that even if the Windows Smartscreen warns you about something suspicious, you are still free to ignore the warning and click through it if you believe that the content you are warned about is actually safe.
How to Disable the Smartscreen on Windows 10
To access the options responsible for the Windows 10 Smartscreen settings, you must go to the Windows Defender Security Center after opening your Start Menu. Go to App and browser control next and you will get the settings for the defender smartscreen. There are three separate sets of settings that can be configured independent from each other. They are related to the apps and files, to the browser and to the Windows Store apps .
In the first two, you can choose to set the defender screen to one out of three possible settings: block, warn and off.
The first option will directly block any unrecognized content, while the second one will only warn you about unrecognized apps/sites (yet will still block ones that known to be dangerous) and you’d still be able to go further and thus ignore the warning. When the off setting is used, no warning or block will be issued. Note that the options related to the Windows Smartscreen for the browser, the defender screen will only work on Microsoft Edge and will not affect or work for any third-party browser (even if they are popular ones like Chrome and Firefox). The settings for the third group (the Windows Storage apps) are only two: warn and off.
How to Disable the Windows Smartscreen on Windows 8
On Windows 8 (and 8.1), in order to access the defender smartscreen settings, you’d need to open the Control Panel and then go to Security >>> Action Center. Next, you’d need to expand the section labeled Security and click on Change Settings under Windows Smart Screen.
The options here are also three – the first one would make Windows ask for an Admin permission to run any unknown apps, the second one would run the unrecognized software but will issue a warning and the third one will not do anything if you attempt to run any unrecognized software.
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