You might think that, much like a pirate going into battle, the more weapons you have at your disposal for your protection the better: cutlass in one hand, pistol and the other, knife held between the teeth (hence the expression ‘armed to the teeth’). But while that may work in old-fashioned combat, it is not the case when it comes to protecting your system from the sea of danger it constantly faces. Running two antivirus programs at the same time is, in fact, a very bad idea. There are three reasons why:
- They will try to kill each other. Because antivirus programs search your system for programs that are monitoring and sending information about your system, a competing antivirus program that is monitoring and sending information about your system tends to look like a virus, so it will attempt to block it and remove it.
A competing antivirus program that is monitoring and sending information about your system tends to look like a virus.
- They will fight over viruses. When an antivirus program encounters a virus, it removes it and quarantines it. But if a competing antivirus program sees that quarantined file and wants to remove and quarantine it in accordance with its own objectives, then it will repeatedly send reports and notifications about this virus that it is detecting, even though it is no longer actually a threat to your system. If you don’t want to continually get bogus warning messages, this will be a problem for you.
- They will sap your power. Antivirus programs use a lot of your system memory to conduct system scans and other related operations. If you have two of these operating simultaneously, your system’s effectiveness can be greatly diminished or completely wiped out altogether, and without any benefit, since the two are performing redundant operations.
When it comes to protecting your computer, more protection is not better. Take some time to do the research and choose one comprehensive antivirus suite that has been independently tested to combat the latest known malware programs and that will singlehandedly arm your system to the teeth to protect it against every type of threat.