2 anti virus in one pc?

[Dinesh]

Hi guys, i know this is madness but i m running Kaspersky Anti Virus 2010 and above that i have installed Microsoft Security Essentials. I have heard that 2 AV will conflict with each other thus making the computer slow. Its been 20 minutes now and i have not experienced any crashes or slow performance so far. Should i remove one or its ok to have both running at the same time?

 

[johngalt]

It's your CPU cycles - but it is never good to have separate *active* scanning engines installed and running simultaneously. if you are trying out MSE, then I'd disable any real time scanning engines in Kaspersky.

Now, if you are only running one *actively* at a time, you can have as many others installed as long as they are not actively running....

Not a bad idea to have one installed to an ISO for emergency purposes - it cannot be modified by Malware, for example...but that is a long and tedious process, especially if you want another OS running to load to check your machine from an external source - take a look at BartPE, or else consider making a second Win7 install as a VHD for emergency recovery / scanning purposes....

 

[Night Hawk]

Some installers will automatically insist on removing any other program once detected depending on which one is first. You can end up with a software conflict with both scanning engines going since they would tend to access the same resources as part of the process.

The MS tools on the other hand seem to be non threatening however to some programs unlike two 3rd party softwares. The MSE simply appears to Kaspersky as another function in Windows apparently and not a threat to the system.

 

[Dinesh]

Thanks John, i will disable real time protection of kaspersky while i use MSE and vice versa.

 

[johngalt]

now that is a good plan. That way yo can test the effectiveness of MSE while having Kaspersky as your default, thereby not losing any of the benefits of your Kaspersky and at the same time not having two very proprietary programs butting heads and killing your CPU softly...with electricity and heat lol.

 

[Dinesh]

I pulled up taskmgr and found that MSE took almost 50 Mb RAM where as Kaspersky is just between 15-20. I removed MSE and will stick with kaspersky. Thanks for the help John.

 

[Night Hawk]

At least you will be one of the few with a chance to try it out.

Alert!

Thank you for your interest in joining the Microsoft® Security Essentials Beta. We are not accepting additional participants at this time. Please check back at a later date for possible additional availability. http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

 

[johngalt]

You can still get MSE - just not from M$....

 

[Night Hawk]

I figured as much. But it seems dinesh saved us all the trouble! It's typical of MS to come out with something nobody wants once tried out. Do you get your regular WDefender updates?

That's as sad as their old MS AntiSpyware Remover a few years back. No thanks! AVG is doing just fine here at next to 0% while still maintaining an active guard.

 

[swarfega]

MSE is now available on connect again.

 

[Ex_Brit]

Not a good idea to run 2 anti-viruses as they can actually conflict with each other and leave you open to infection.

Rule of thumb 1 only of each of the following: anti-virus, firewall*, pop-up blocker, anti-phishing filter.

A couple of anti-spyware applications is OK, however, minus any active protection** they may have.

*Exception is when you have an extra hardware firewall, as in a router.

** Exception, that I've found, SpywareBlaster.

 

[johngalt]

SpywareBlaster is not active protection in any sense of the word - in that it adds a bunch of registry settings to block access to known malicious sites, much like a HOSTS file would do, but it does this from the registry. In this respect, you can have numerous apps like Spybot, MBAM, A-Squared Anti Malware, etc., leave one running with *active* protection, and you're good.

having a second (backup) AV is not a bad idea at all - no single one AV product is perfect - and never will be. However, as I noted before, *running* more than one simultaneously can be bad (or can have absolutely no detrimental effect if both are intelligent enough to be both self-aware and aware of each other....

 

[Night Hawk]

It's not having a second program for anything actually since any one can still have a hit or miss! It's having two with active shields at the same time is where you run into a number of headaches from one clashing with the other.

Each may also see the other as some form of threat to the system when both are active simply due to them both not being integrated with or an addon to Windows itself from MS. You'll note that from why nothing goes after Windows Defender since all software providers have developed each program to work around it.

 

[Dinesh]

Anti viruses are memory resident programs and they boot up when the OS loads. It can cause performance issues as the memory is then shared by both AV. I removed MSE and will stick to kaspersky. But i had kept both the Av engines active for almost an hour but did not find any performance issues. Strange!

 

[edrik]

Hi guys, i know this is madness but i m running Kaspersky Anti Virus 2010 and above that i have installed Microsoft Security Essentials. I have heard that 2 AV will conflict with each other thus making the computer slow. Its been 20 minutes now and i have not experienced any crashes or slow performance so far. Should i remove one or its ok to have both running at the same time?

In my opinion running two AV at the same time would cause conflicts and would really slow down your system's performance, let's say both AV automatically scanned at the same time (active protection scan).

 

[Night Hawk]

Not strange since you were likely not even running active scans while the resident shields were loaded. Once you started a full system sweep or a scheduled scan.... ? :shock: "ut ooooo...." anything is possible including one trashing the other!

 

[Dinesh]

Avast detects MSE updates as trojan, which is a false positive. So its not recommended to run 2 AV on single OS.

 

[Night Hawk]

It never has been! In fact one program's uninstaller will generally prompt you to remove any other existing program or ask if you want the installer itself to do that for you in some cases. Each out of two or more would automatically clash with each other as a rule. One wants to be A#1 protection as always.

 

[NecroGnomezZz]

Avast V5 & System Suite v10

It never has been! In fact one program's uninstaller will generally prompt you to remove any other existing program or ask if you want the installer itself to do that for you in some cases. Each out of two or more would automatically clash with each other as a rule. One wants to be A#1 protection as always.

I run AVAST v5 And Avanquest's System Suite v10 both at the same time. Also it's dual firewalls as both the packages have firewalls and the way i set it up they coinscide just fine avast v5 is on home network monitoring and system suite is allow all, works for me. Both take care of my malware issues. System Suite v10 is more of the go getter when it comes to malwares as it comes up quite often with it's malware monitoring, whereas AVAST is more quiet and not so prominently on guard. Anyway to update I updated from Win7-H.p.-x64 to ULT-x64 and did all the ms updates and now i can pretty much install anything i am quite happy with Win7 now finally! peace!

 

[Night Hawk]

To respond to that I recently went for a 30 day trial with Vipre and still saw AVG on but disabled in the msconfig just for the IE security toolbar option without any clashes. From the findings there it walks right past AVG, NOD32, Avast, and a number of other av and antimalware programs plus is far lighter on resources.

I had to give that one the "thumbs up" for being a top notch software even finding things hidden inside a zip being stored on one drive but never opened! Their free Vipre Recovery Program cleans just about anything possible off of a bug infested system when tested. I knew the test machine was loaded quite well with all sorts when running the tool on it!