Adding anti-virus exclusions for Dartcom software

We recommend using the Microsoft Defender anti-virus software built into Windows. It's free, light on system resource usage and offers an excellent level of protection.

It's essential that you add some exclusions to your anti-virus software, otherwise it will greatly impact on the performance of the system and could adversely affect live data acquisition and processing.

Before adding the exclusions, start each of the Dartcom programs on your PC, then close them again. This ensures all the folders that need to be excluded will exist.

To add the necessary exclusions to Microsoft Defender:

1. Click the Start icon (Windows logo) then click Settings.
2. Click the Update & Security icon.
3. Click the Windows Security icon on the left.
4. Click Virus & threat protection. This will open the Windows Security app.
5. Under Virus & threat protection settings, click Manage settings.
6. Scroll down to the Exclusions heading and click Add or remove exclusions, clicking Yes when asked to allow changes to your device.
7. Click + Add an exclusion and select Folder.
8. In the Folder box, enter %temp% and press the Enter key. This will go to your temporary folder.
9. Select the Dartcom iDAP folder and click Select Folder.
10. Repeat steps 7 to 10 for the Dartcom MacroPro, Dartcom Geostationary Ingester and Dartcom Polar Orbiter Ingester folders, skipping any that don't exist on your PC.
11. Add further folder exclusions for locations in which ingested data is being archived or images are being saved.
12. Click + Add an exclusion and select Process.
13. In the Enter process name box, enter iDAP.exe and click Add.
14. Repeat steps 12 to 13 to add process exclusions for MacroPro.exe, Geostationary Ingester.exe and Polar Orbiter Ingester.exe.

You can now start each of the Dartcom programs and check everything works as expected.

Unless you change the locations in which ingested data is being archived or images are being saved, no further anti-virus exclusions should be needed.