I have never seen anyone address this question, obvious as it seems to me. I have a couple of antispyware programs doing real time monitoring, and I have a few others that I run scans with once a week, but they take a fairly long time to run. Can I economize on time by running more than one at a time, i.e. running scans of spybot and spywaredoctor simultaneously? I realize it may slow down the computer, but it does that anyway when I scan, so no big deal. Will doing this cause the programs to miss anything? The reason I want to run them simultaneously is because the programs always slow my computer considerably when I scan, and I'd like to shorten that time. I am running Pentium 4, 2GHz, 786 DDR RAM, XP Home

Edit: Moved topic from XP to the more appropriate forum. ~ Animal

High deserthawk, and welcome to BleepingComputer.

Having two or more anti virus utilities running at the same time usually results in conflicts and false positives, we recommend that this not be done. I don't believe there would be any point in trying to run more than one scan at a time and I don't think it would save any time, this might even prove to be a problem and take longer than running them separately.

I will add that...some scanners (e.g., Windows Defender) seem to be system-intensive and probably won't allow for running another scanner at the same time.

Louis

it wouldn't be very good for the hard drive either, 2 programs trying to read the files at the same time

I was wondering what you would do when they both detect the same infected files... Which scanner would you use to remove them? Which means I guess, if you use one, you'll have to re-scan with the other one...

Thank you all for your quick replies. I will take your advice and continue running them one at a time.

HI,
When both scanners detect the same infected file(s) it doesn't really matter which one you remove it from.
I guess I need to stop scanning with 2 anti-spyware program at once. Just a quick note, when I scan with 2 anti-spyware scans I found out that one scanner finds like 3 warnings and another finds 1 infection with no warning.
Just asking why? Is it just because that some programs miss an spyware and another catches it or is there any other reasons?

Regards,
Extrmemboy

Each malware detection program...whether antispyware or antivirus...each is developed and maintained by different groups of personnel.

Each has its own unique way of doing what it was designed to do, using different databases and procedures.

That's why it's such a fallacy to assume that only 1 program can really do an adequate job of protecting a system...against everything that the malware misanthropes can dream up daily.

No one program can do it all and it's not unusual for one program to find items which another did not alert on.

AV programs are concerned primarily with known viruses but they may also detect some forms of other malware...not all.

Same situation applies to any single malware detection program (e.g. Windows Defender, Spyblaster, SuperAntispyware, etc.),which is why it's generally suggested to employ at least two such programs.

Louis

I go for running one at a time; I know some people get impatient with the time scans take

BUT you have put those tool on your computer havent you? so let 'em run and do their work one at a time OFF line ; have a cuppa..... watch tv......or a meal.......but do keep an eye ON the scans to see if it asks anything of/from you whilst scanning as yas never knows does ya