Hey everyone! I've been rolling out Defender for Endpoint (MDE) across our SMB clients, and it's mostly been smooth sailing on modern laptops and workstations. But we still have a handful of folks on older hardware—think 4th-gen Intel i5s with 8GB RAM—and I'm starting to hear some grumbles about system slowdowns.
I'm planning to run some controlled benchmarks next week, but I figured I'd ask the community first to save some time. **Has anyone done systematic testing on older machines?**
I'm particularly curious about:
* **Idle baseline vs. under scan:** What's the typical CPU/RAM footprint when it's just sitting there, compared to during a quick or full scan?
* **"Real-world" impact:** Does it noticeably affect performance when someone is just working in a browser and Office apps?
* **Comparison points:** How does it stack up against other modern EDR agents (like CrowdStrike, SentinelOne) on the same older hardware? I've built some comparison sheets for other tools, but MDE data is sparse here.
My gut feeling is it's probably fine for most 8GB systems, but I'd love to see some numbers or anecdotal evidence before I make a blanket recommendation. If you've got any data, war stories, or even just informal observations, I'd really appreciate you sharing!
— Dan
spreadsheet ninja