Anti-Virus

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Is it ok to run two anti-virus programs?

Theoretically, yes. In practice, probably not.

Almost certainly nothing catastrophic will happen but either of the following symptoms may occur:

• Files "quarantined" by one piece of anti-virus software will continue to be detected as having a virus by the other software.
• Real-time scanning of every file you access will take place twice (or more) making your machine noticeably slower.

You won't detect many more viruses, either. They will mostly overlap each other and both will be too slow to save you from the latest threats.

In fact, running any anti-virus software can make your machine noticeably slower. The ideal number of anti-virus programs to be running all the time is zero. You might achieve this without risking all your data through some combination of the following:

• Run Apple's Mac OS X or Ubuntu Linux instead of Windows.
• Keep up-to-date backups (you should be doing this whatever your anti-virus strategy - hard drives do fail, a lot)
• Run everyday actions as a non-Administrator account (unfortunately running as Administrator as standard is deeply ingrained on Windows and some programs won't like this solution).

Posted by Thomas David Baker on Thursday, April 17, 2008

Thomas David Baker also runs bluebones.net | londoncinema.bluebones.net | The Diary of a Nobody