Two Anti-Virus programs Compatibility

[MaDonna]

Is it possible for a person to run 2 Anti-Virus programs at the same time? I have Norton 2004, but have been reading about the free avg. Will they work well together?

 

Now for another question. For some reason my Spyware Dr. and my Spysweeper don't work very well together. Spy Dr. seems to take forever to load and I had to take it off my start programs, because I kept getting an error message. I emailed their support, but never did hear back.

 

Thanks...I guess this is more than 1 ?... Oh, well...

[Andavari]

You should never have two antivirus, antispyware, running and/or scanning at the same time, they'll conflict with each other possibly causing false positives and may very well crash your system.

 

The only way to have two installed antivirus programs coexist in harmony is to have one of them completely disabled, e.g.; its resident shield must not be active. When you want to scan with the disabled antivirus scanner you must remember to disable the resident shield of your primary antivirus program.

 

Since there's always a conflict waiting to happen with two antivirus programs installed, it's better to use one of the free online virus scan services, however you still have to remember to disable the resident shield of your installed antivirus.

[bpm3k]

If you want a free backup AV. You should try BitDefender 8 Free Edition; it is only an on-demand scanner and has no resident component to disable.

 

Additionally, Bitdefender has better detection rates than AVG.

 

Go here for AV tests and comparisions.