Hi, just had a quick question. If I am violating the forum rules, please let me know. I'm very new but want to be compliant.

My question is I have AVG as my AV program. Should I install avast? or will the two conflict? I've learned on the board that you should only have one firewall, but was just wondering about AV programs.

Currently on my system I use Zone Alarm as my firewall, AVG as my AV, Spybot and Adaware as my anti spyware programs. I also use SpywareBlaster.

Any recommendations woudl be helpful.

Thanks for your help.

Never have more than one anti-virus software installed on your computer (this is also the case with firewalls). I have used AVG for a long time, and I have found it to be very reliable and easy-to-use, so I'd keep AVG, please do not install Avast as well.
Hope this helps with your problem..
Thanks,
Charles

Can you have more than one resident Anti-virus program?
Can you? YES
Should you? NO
Is it a good idea, do you get better protection? NO

The danger, is that one antivirus program may (Read this as eventually will) see
the others definition files as viruses, and will remove them. This is not so much a problem with manual scans, where you only run one Antivirus program at a time, if you pay close attention to what it detects, and where. If you manually configure it to ignore the other program, and its files, then you minimize the risk from this problem.

The big problem, is the silent threat. Most antivirus programs will scan web based (not necessarily all, like P2P, and IM) file transfers. It is quite common, for one antivirus program, to detect the incomming virus updates for the other. Thinking parts of the definition files are viruses in their own right, the AV will strip these out of the update.
The end result? Instead of having two, or even one, up to date fully functional
antivirus programs, you have two severely crippled programs, which are each
missing critical definition, and detection files .

So, it is best to have one antivirus program, and keep it up to date and use it
properly.
Then, if you experience a problem, or question its efficiency, you run an online scan.

http://www.pandasoftware.com/activescan/
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

thank you so much for your replies. I'm learning so much from these forums and hope to pass the info along to people who need it, or at least the website. thx again.

You're quite welcome, Bernie70.
Glad to be of help.
Don't hesitate to ask any questions you may have.

Hello again. I have another question (and would like to get bumped). But anway, my set up is the following

AVG-antivirus
Zonealarm - firewall
Spyware Blaster - antispyware
Spybot - antispyware
Ad-aware - anti spyware

I'd like some extra protection and/or removal programs that are generally regarded as safe and which won't conflict with my set up. Some of the ones I was thnking of are the following

A-squared
Spyware guard (according to the description, it goes well with spyware blaster).

I have all that you already have, and also A-squared & Spyware guard.
And have for quite some time, without any problems.

As Scarlett suggested, you have downloaded some good programmes there that work and are needed.

You could and i recommend should, download the new version of Ewido anti-spyware from HEREand update it. Its an excellent piece of software and i wouldnt be without it.

Just one other thing, If you have Spybot installed with Tea-timer, then you wont need spywareguard as they both do pretty much the same thing.

thank you scarlet.

and Grave, I didnt know about the tea-timer. I guess I missed that part in the tutorial. Man i love those things.

thanks so much.

You are welcome,anymore problems and you only need to say

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