Microsoft Defender crashes continuously

For context, I have a ROG STRIX gaming laptop with a Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900HX, 16 GB of RAM, and a NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Laptop GPU. Over the past few months, it's become impossible to play just about any game without it crashing. Some games I can only play for a few minutes, others I can play for an hour or two.

Today, I discovered Event Viewer and learned that Microsoft Defender is incapable of not crashing and has been doing this since about late March. It isn't a exaggeration to say it's happening every 5-20 seconds. I don't know if this is The Problem but it feels like a factor.

I have 1,307 instances of this error in the last 24 hours:

>Event 7031, Service Control Manager

The Microsoft Defender Antivirus Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 5 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 60000 milliseconds: Restart the service.

I also have 64 instances of:

>Event 1000, Application Error

Faulting application name: MsMpEng.exe, version: 4.18.26030.3011, time stamp: 0xeaa752c1 Faulting module name: mpengine.dll, version: 1.1.26030.3008, time stamp: 0x62b9c1ff Exception code: 0xc0000409 Fault offset: 0x000000000002b119 Faulting process id: 0x3CE4 Faulting application start time: 0x1DCE3F52B4518ED Faulting application path: C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Platform\\4.18.26030.3011-0\\MsMpEng.exe Faulting module path: C:\\ProgramData\\Microsoft\\Windows Defender\\Definition Updates\\{34DF5D46-4BB3-49C2-ABC7-9EC690AA0F17}\\mpengine.dll Report Id: fb3ad988-9f35-43b2-8e9d-5a16c34dcd50 Faulting package full name: Faulting package-relative application ID:

Thoughts? Hardware? Software? Time to take it into the shop and let the experts handle it?