I guess it was last week that Windows Spyware told me I should upgrade to Windows Defender Beta 2. I upgraded but it did not seem to be able to get current spyware definitions. That was an annoyance but since I was running it on my server I put off finding the problem. I rarely access the internet from the server so it was a low priority.
Today(Sunday) I was looking at applying any patches and possilbly rebooting so I decided to research the problem. The first thing I figured out was that the recommendations from the troubleshooting page did not work for me. Hmm…at the bottom of the screen it talked about getting updates through automatic updates. Well, that was different. I was in WSUS recently and there weren’t any Windows Defender updates detected. So I went back in and went to Options-Synchronization Options and started poking about. The first thing I figured out that I needed to change the Products and click on Windows Defender. I synchronized the server and then tried to update Windows Defender. I was was not successful. So I went back to the Options-Synchronization Options-Update classifications and clicked on a new category, Definition Updates. I synchronized the server again and then did a custom view of Windows Defender Definition Updates. There were updates for me to approve! So I approved the last update and tried to update Windows Defender. It worked!
Okay, setting up Windows Defender is different than Microsoft’s Spyware. There is a lot more configuration to do if you use WSUS. To make sure than I did not have spend any more time caring and feeding Windows Defender I had to do one more thing. I went into Automatic Approval Options and set it up to automatically approve for installation the Definition Updates.