Two Anti virus programs

[snagel]

Lately, I have been reading that you can run two Anti-virus programs at the same time if you are only running one of them in real time protection.
They were stating that if you had two professional or paid for programs like Norton and Avira that you could use them if you disable the realtime protection on one of them Thus only using the second as a on demand scanner.

Is this true?



My understanding before reading this was that you could only run one anti-virus at a time.

I would really like to have a definitive answer on this. Your help is appreciated.

thanks snagel

[admin]

If you disable real time protection, then the AV software is not really doing much on your system other than taking a bunch of resources and possibly causing conflicts with your other software. The only advantage would be that you can do a full system scan using two software, as opposed to just one, and that may catch more.

I would say most AV companies recommend only using one software at a time, although they've got their own motives in not wanting you to use a competitor's product (even if the other one is free), but it's still mostly good advice.

The paid for version of Avira Security Suite apparently has a very high detection rate (http://www.pcauthority.com.au/Review...vered-gem.aspx), so having that by itself should be enough. Kaspersky is another one that has a high detection rate, Norton is average in this respect.

I also recommend getting security suites, as opposed to individual AV + firewall packages, since compatibility and resource management is better, and it's usually cheaper unless you're going with a free solution for one of them.