To Re-Install Valorant, simply head over to the Valorant Website, sign into your Riot Games account and download the Installer. It also means if an expert hacker was able to breach Vanguard, they’d also have access to your computer.īut it is unlikely that someone will be able to hack into Vanguard anytime soon, and Riot has even offered a $100,000 bounty for any hacker that can. It comes down to whether you trust Riot Games not to do anything malicious with this software.
What makes Vanguard different is that it has Ring 0 access and that it needs to be running the entire time your PC is on.
It isn’t uncommon for anti-cheat software to have Kernal access. If Riot had bad intentions, they could take advantage of this. This means it can potentially see everything you do. Vanguard runs on Ring 0 of the Kernal, which is why it needs to run on boot (Windows cannot add programs to Ring 0 after boot). Vanguard is not spyware, but it does act like it. However, if they check their services, Vanguard will be there, and there’s no way to play without it. When they do this, Vanguard does not appear in their system tray. Some players have disabled Vanguard from their startup programs, rebooted, and launched Valorant. However, the only way to play Valorant is by allowing Vanguard to run, atleast while you play.Įveryone has to decide for themselves whether the gaming experience is worth letting a program like Vanguard run or not. It is very unfortunate that players cannot play Valorant without Vanguard because many players do not trust software like this running on their PC 24/7. If you exit Vanguard, you will need to reboot before you can play. You can remove Vanguard from your startup programs, and it will not longer run as soon as you launch your PC, however it will run as soon as you launch Valorant. It is not possible to play Valorant without Vanguard running simultaneously. Some people have mentioned that there may be about 10 files leftover, but that it’s pretty much unnoticeable. You can also just completely delete the Valorant folder. Go to the task tray, find the red Vanguard icon, right click on it, then choose “Exit Vanguard”.
On top of this, uninstalling Valorant does not automatically uninstall Vanguard.īefore trying to install Vanguard, make sure you exit Vanguard from the Task tray in the bottom right of Windows.
If you do not uninstall Vanguard first, you’re probably going to get some kind of Windows error when you attempt to uninstall Valorant. The important takeaway here is that you need to uninstall Vanguard before you uninstall Valorant. Find “Valorant” in the list of programs, and choose “uninstall.Open the “Add or Remove Programs” tool from the search results.Search for “Add or Remove Programs” in the search bar in the bottom left of Windows.
Run the file called “Uninstall.exe” by double clicking on it from the list of files.