probably a simple newbie question...

well im not exactly Mr. comp whiz....lol people say i know just enough to screw one up....but i was reading about how to protect my comp from malware on this site and it says don't run multiple AV's.... well i was wondering why not? and is it ok to have multiple spyware blockers and antispywares?


thnx 4 the help

 

There are several reasons for not having 2 AV programs running, the main one is that nowadays all Antivirus programs have what is called 'On Access' scanning. This means that every time you access a file (For example open a word document, or goto a webpage) that file is scanned by the 'on access' scanner. This is all well and good and 2 different prgrams will sometimes quite happily run next to each other in this situation. HOWEVER as soon as you get infected both of these Scanners will find the infection and attemp to fix it causing all sorts of access errors and causing at least one or both Antivirus programs to crash. At worse your computer could become inoperable and at this point you would have to manually remove one or both of the programs.

You also need to consider the CPU time implications. Some AV programs such as norton are very processor intense, running 2 AV programs like this would cause a noticable degredation to your computers performance

The same thing applies to antispyware products but with a difference, not all Antispyware products have realtime protection so you can use 2 different products: One for scanning such as adaware and one for realtime protection such as WIndows Defender. Realtime protection is more important than scanning as it will attempt to prevent an infection before it happens where as scanning will attemtp to clean it up after its done. Scanning programs such as adaware are good for getting less critical issues such as cookies and mrus.

Hopefully this leaves you a bit clearer on this issue.

 

yes thank you.