anti virus help

hi,guys
i am using win7, would you guys use windows defender and advast free anti virus together,or just use only one on its own ?
thanks guys,
bluesfloyd.

 

Avast will block the defender from working ,you can still use a anti-malware
in addition.

 

Windows defender for a computer is kind of like a Public defender for a courtroom: not very good if at all. Free and paid antivirus alternatives fare much better. Avast is good, as is AVG. Kaspersky is one of the best. I wouldn't ever use Norton or Mcafee. They do more harm than good. Malwarebytes Antimalware is another good free one (if you want to pay for what they offer, they have a realtime resident shield that is good at catching most online threats and malware, but you can use a good resident shield that is free from one of the other antivirus packages to pick up the slack from that. The advantage of their paid version is that it runs lighter than having two free solutions to do what one inexpensive one can do, but the choice is yours really). Avast and Kaspersky have anti-rootkit scanners that can help you protect your windows system a little better on top of the other features, so it may be worth it to use one of those two in tandem with malwarebytes, but I wouldn't bother with windows defender.

 

From what I know, you cannot install 2 anti-virus at the same time for it will have a complication. As said by @something back, one will block the other. By the way, our home computer's anti-virus doesn't update the virus list since January 2015. Last month, when there seemed to be something strange in the computer, my husband uninstalled the Symantec and installed the free version of AVG. Oh, there were 32 viruses that were trapped. So now I understand that an up to date virus list is vital to the computer's security.

 

Two antivirus programs, both loaded and running simultaneously, will be, at the very least, redundant. And it in this case, you don't want redundancy. Keep in mind that every program running uses RAM and clock cycles, potentially slowing down every other running program. A well-made antivirus program has a very small footprint, and doesn't slow things down significantly. But two such programs running together will slow it down twice as much. And it could be worse. The two programs may conflict with each other--remember that every time you download a file, both will try to scan it. Conflicts could result in other programs failing to work and Windows becoming less stable.

Regards,
Walter Garcia
Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider
http://www.o365cloudexperts.com

 

I use Avast and it seems to be pretty solid. It's been working for like 5 years or so and it never let me down. So, for those who don't have it, I recommend you try it. It's even available for free. The version is kind of limited but still works well enough.

 

I don't think it's advisable to have more than one antivirus running on your computer at once, they would disrupt each other from working correctly which would only defeat the purpose of the whole thing.

 

I definitely wouldn't just rely on Windows Defender alone. It's not really that sufficient. Running two antivirus programs simultaneously can cause a software conflict, although when I bought my new laptop it had both Windows Defender and Mcafee pre-installed and ran both automatically. I think in this respect you can use Windows Defender as a backup. I would, however, advise you to get something like the free version of Avast and use that mainly. It's definitely one of the best free antivirus programs out there.

 

Two anti-virus programs running at the same time could cause issues. Even if they don't conflict, they could slow the computer down. What you could do is have only one anti-virus software active and have another one that you occasionally do scans with. The second one could be anti-malware software. I have Comodo Internet Security as a firewall and anti-virus software and also Malwarebytes for doing some scans sometimes.

 

Windows defender has come a long way and it's actually a very robust option for many users for everyday use, in most cases you don't need any other security software than that. Most antivirus now are very intrusive and some of them even to the point to become viruses themselves. I think the best antivirus out there is common sense. If you know what you're doing online and if you're aware that you shouldn't download things from stranger nor click on weird links then you should be fine. I haven't used antivirus software in over 10 years and haven't been infected.