Windows 11 comes with many more security features than its predecessors. One of these features is VBS but it is not to be confused with the VBScript which was very popular around 20 years ago. In fact the deadly “I love you” virus that wrecked large networks and caused millions in damages to the big corporations almost 20 years ago, was written using VBScript. But VBS in Windows 11 is entirely different – it stands for Virtualization-Based Security.
The concept is not new and has already been used for years by many security software vendors. Basically what it does is that it runs the executed code inside a sandbox preventing any real damage by malicious code to your file system and the operating system.
If you have already decided to install a third-party security software from reliable vendors like Avast or ESET then you can disable the VBS on Windows 11 to free up system resources for other apps or games. You will notice a little performance boost after disabling VBS. Here is how you can disable VBS on a Windows 11 PC:
- First of all check if VBS is enabled. If it is not enabled, then why bother going through these steps? In order to check, you have to press Win+R to open the Run dialog and then enter msinfo32 in the Run dialog. You will find whether VBS is enabled or not in the System Summary.
- If VBS is enabled, then you have to open Windows Registry editor by pressing Win+R and entering regedit in the Run dialog. Then create a new DWORD value named EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurity under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\DeviceGuard. Its value should be set to 0.
- Restart your Windows 11 PC for the new settings to load.
- After your PC has restarted into Windows, launch msinfo32 again (just like in step 1) to check if VBS has been disabled. You will see its status has been changed to Not enabled.
These are simple steps to disable VBS on Windows 11. If at any later time, we want to enable VBS, we can follow the same steps and change the value of EnableVirtualizationBasedSecurity in step 2 above to 1. After this we have to restart the PC once again.