It is a very valuable security feature

Data Execution Prevention (DEP) is a system-level security feature included in Windows machines. The main purpose of DEP is to monitor processes and services to protect against malicious code exploits by terminating any program that is not running properly in memory.

This feature, also known as executable space protection, consists of a set of hardware and software technologies that perform additional checks on system memory to prevent malicious code from executing.

When a malicious program attempts to execute code in specific system memory locations reserved for authorized programs and Windows, DEP marks it as non-executable and generates an error message.