Multiple anti virus & firewall programs

Hi
For a number of years I have had AVG, Zone alarm and Trend Micro PC-cillin installed without any major issues. OK I have needed to tweak ZA, but really they haven't upset each other too much. Recently these guys, specifically ZA & Trend are not freinds. When writting on forums I have to exit from one of those promgrams or else it keeps 'losing' my log in. Presumably this has been caused by a Trend update. So, do I really NEED to be running more than one anti virus program (AVG & Trend) & more than one Firewall (ZA & Trend - the Windows one is switched off) or are they interfering with each other too much and hence may let something naughty in. My annual Trend subscription is due next week so I'm more than happy to try a better & recommended similar program.
So what do you guys/boffins recommend????
Thanks

 

in my experience i've found that there is little to nothing gained from running multiple anti-viruses and fire walls. They bog your system down, crawl all over one another and get tangled up. pick your favorites of the bunch and ditch the rest. one of each is sufficient. i use AVG(its free and i'm cheap) and since i've got a hardware firewall i don't have anything as far as software goes but i've used Zone Alarm and never had any major issues.

 

If you are using the background scanning on both Anti-Virus programs then running 2 is generally counter productive (they interfere with one another). If you only use them to scan on an ad-hoc basis eg. leave PC-cillin on all the time and run an AVG scan every Saturday then you are fine.

I believe Firewalls are the same (ie don't run 2). Personally I only ever run one AV and one Firewall (+ spywareguard and spywareblaster) and my PC hasn't had any problems in 2 years.

My suggestion would be to use the recommendations on the forum stickies here.

 

Check out this page on MGs http://www.majorgeeks.com/page.php?id=20

Next to "Protect my computer from viruses" and "Protect my computer with a firewall" it says Pick only one. There is a reason it says this and you should not be running more than one of each. As Bogus said, at the very least it will slow your system down incredibly and is totally unecessary.

 

thanks for the reply guys. Well my router (netgear dg834g) apparently has a firewall in it though I've never had to tinker with its settings or update it. Sounds like I should stop using ZA AND Trend together and only have one anti virus application running and use the other for occasional scanning. As I've got a few days left of Trend that is what I'm going to use at the moment.