Microsoft Defender is causing slow VLC startups. Here’s the fix
Here's what you can do to fix it Credit: VLC For some time now, there have been complaints across various online forums about how the popular VLC Media Player takes several seconds (sometimes half a minute!) to start up. The problem occurs regardless of size or the type of media file you wish to play. There’s also some unfounded accusations against the VideoLan developers; one often reads claims that Microsoft is deliberately slowing down the open-source media player.
- ▪Here's what you can do to fix it Credit: VLC For some time now, there have been complaints across various online forums about how the popular VLC Media Player takes several seconds (sometimes half a minute!) to start up.
- ▪The problem occurs regardless of size or the type of media file you wish to play.
- ▪There’s also some unfounded accusations against the VideoLan developers; one often reads claims that Microsoft is deliberately slowing down the open-source media player.
PCWorld files mainly under tech. We currently carry 437 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | PCWorld |
| Canonical URL | https://www.pcworld.com/article/3227644/microsoft-defender-is-causing-slow-vlc-startups-heres-the-fix.html |
| Publication time | Mon, 21 Sep 2026 15:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-21T15:03:49.501Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-21T15:03:49.501Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SBZCpAMIV4qx · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
VLC running slower than usual? Here's what you can do to fix it Credit: VLC For some time now, there have been complaints across various online forums about how the popular VLC Media Player takes several seconds (sometimes half a minute!) to start up. The problem occurs regardless of size or the type of media file you wish to play. There’s also some unfounded accusations against the VideoLan developers; one often reads claims that Microsoft is deliberately slowing down the open-source media player. However, this theory is contradicted by the fact that this problem only affects some Windows computers. For instance, on one of my PCs running Windows 10, this “moment of silence” when launching VLC has been noticeable for some time. But on a Windows 11 PC, the problem doesn’t occur.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at PCWorld.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from PCWorld
