Why is it not recommended to have 2 antivirus programs running at the same time?
In: Technology
Because each antivirus program “hooks” into computer operations that involve things like reading a file, receiving stuff from the Internet, etc. so that it can intercept the data and check it before it gets passed on for further processing.
This has a noticeable impact on system performance. And of course if you’ve now got two antivirus programs doing this, things slow down even more (plus there’s a risk that they won’t play nicely with eachother, which would cause worse problems than just slowness).
I guess if you could know for sure that one antivirus program only caught half of the viruses and the other one caught the other half, it might make sense, but in reality, *most* antivirus programs detect *most* of the same viruses, so there is no reason to use more than one considering the impact on performance.
And in fact with recent versions of Windows you don’t even need any antivirus program at all, because the function is built in and works well already.
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