at present i have both avast (free) and windows security essentials running on my pc.is it a bad idea to have them both running? (have been using avast up until a day or so ago when i added microsoft antivirus also). ta 🙂

Having made this mistake myself a while back, and it didn’t seem to do any damage, but the pc was notably slower.

From the reviews I’ve seen, and I thought msoft security was good enough to cover most issues. (cue stw’s IT experts absolutely ripping into it!)

Same reason that you shouldnt have one antivirus prog running – they are all crap. Get a mac. 😉

But then you’d actually have a Mac.

The downside is speed. Microsoft Security Essentials on its own is fine.

Speed – but they can also interfere with one another causing other technical issues.

MSE is all you need.

MSE is all you need.

I think that they can fight each other (treat the other one as a virus)

All you need is Malwarebytes and CCleaner. just don’t download from any dodgy torrent sites and porn. run malwarebytes at least once a week and run CCleaner’s Registry cleaner whenever you download/uninstall anything.

^ that.
MSE is pretty good i think.

They’ll probably do nothing much apart from slow down your PC until you actually get a virus, then their behaviour is unpredictable – which one gets it first, which one cleans it, deadlocks when they both try to delete it etc. You could always try loading EICAR and see what happens, but don’t blame me if it destroys your PC! MSE on its own should do everything you need.

glupton1976 – Member
Same reason that you shouldnt have one antivirus prog running – they are all crap. Get a mac.

Ooo – so Macs are, somehow, immune to viruses and other computer nasties??

Or I could just email my Credit Card details to some chap in Ukraine, probably cost me less all in all.

If you want extra security then run Malware bites as well

We had a virus

Malwarebytes got it

4 other virus checkers missed it