Will downloading an antispyware program and an antivirus program mess up my computer?

Question

A few weeks ago, I installed a few antivirus programs and a few anti spyware programs, and it totally crashed my computer. Would it be okay to just have one antivirus program and one antispyware program? Will that crash my computer or not?

Answer 1

You do not want to have multiple anti-virus' on your machine.  There are two main reasons for this:

1) Multiple filter level drivers will conflict with one another (Can cause OS to crash).

2) Some AV will detect the other AV as a virus and remove necessary files.

It is ok to have antiSpyware run beside antivirus as long as the antispyware does not use a filter level driver.

Answer 2

Best to have one each then they cant conflick with the firewalls, install malwarebytes cuz these free addition anti-virus dosent remove backdoor trojans hosting viruses.

Answer 3

Virus Protection-- 2 programs of virus protection will conflict with each other and will actually cancel out the protection. I suggest Avast OR AVG.

Running Spybot and Defender, with EITHER Avast or Avg (great Free virus protection programs ) will keep a computer in good working condition.

Windows Defender and Spybot are 2 really good Spyware Programs.

Links Below are Programs that WILL Help. They are FREE.

I have Both AVG and Spybot on my computer.

AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition 7.5.519

http://www.download.com/AVG-Anti-Virus-F...

Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.5.2

http://www.download.com/Spybot-Search-De...

Avast

http://www.avast.com/eng/home-registrati...

Ccleaner

http://www.download.com/3120-20_4.html?q...

Hope this helps.

Good Luck

Answer 4

Antivirus programs that are not compatible will certainly crash your computer. Just buy a Internet Security Suite program that has all these features. They are designed to work together.  

Answer 5

avg is ok

Answer 6

Many good answers and advice already given.  One thing I learned

to do when having multiple antispy and antivirus programs is to

set your own scheduled updates and computer scans times.  Many

times these are preset to update and scan when you first turn

on your computer.  They slow the computer down, and can lock

it up, especially if you are doing your thing on the computer at

the same time.  Plus, they bump heads with each other as they

are trying to do their thing.  Schedule each for a different day

or time so that they can run their update and scan without

interference from you or another antispy or antivirus program.

This helped a lot for me.

Answer 7

You can only have one anti-virus program running at a time. As far as anti-spyware programs are concerned, running more than one is usually not a problem. For instance, I run both Spybot Search and Destroy and Spyware Blaster with no problems.

Answer 8

You should only have one antivirus program on your computer.  They dont play nicely with other antivirus programs and you get lots of false reports of viruses.

BTW - Try to avoid Nortons anti virus - it is much slower and bigger ( bloated) than free ones like AVG and AntiVir

You can have more than one spyware program - they dont interfere with each other.  I like ad-aware and spy bot