# Antivirus and Anti Malware Problems

If you are experiencing performance problems during Scoop installs—like high CPU usage, or file access denied errors—it's possible that an anti-malware or anti-virus program is scanning files as they are being extracted and installed.

# Windows Defender

You can exclude the directories that Scoop uses from realtime scanning by running this command as an administrator:

Add-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "$($env:programdata)\scoop", "$($env:scoop)"

If you want to undo this change and re-enable realtime scanning of these directories:

Remove-MpPreference -ExclusionPath "$($env:programdata)\scoop", "$($env:scoop)"

References: Issue #1388