"I hope Windows Defender really has stepped up their game like so many people have told me before because I don't know what my other option are."

I have my doubts about Windblows Defender, I heard negative reports including the latest one from my guru who built this wee beastie. When I told him I went through AVG and Avast and was using Windows Defender in the interim and asked his advice on what to use. WD goes for wont, it has few extra features, gives many false positives, and is not easy to manage. Also it lacks deep customization options, and scores lower in lab tests as compared to its competitors. He told me about ESET, I installed and set it up and it disabled WD as does any third party AV. It works well with Malwarebytes and both are set to scan on schedule, they're not bloatware or resource hogs, they work quietly in the background with no noticeable effect on any work I'm doing.

So there you have it, a sure fire tried and true, highly rated and approved (also by your friendly neighborhood grumpy old bastid) protection, real time and scheduled scan against every bit of crap known to Man. Since nothing is 100% guaranteed foolproof it pays to have a good backup system to restore the drive(s) in the event of nothing else works or drive failure. That's where Active@ Disk Image Professional, a removable backup drive, and a boot stick for working outside the OS come in handy.