Why is it not recommended to have 2 antivirus programs running at the same time?
In: Technology
For the same reason you shouldn’t take two placebos. If one isn’t enough, two isn’t enough.
All the other stuff + 2 snake oils doesn’t heal your illness faster. Maybe you should run TuneUp to clean your registry or manually defrag your harddrive as well.
They fight.
No, really. Many AV products not only look at files, but the behaviour of applications running on the computer. To them, another AV product, which is accessing files all over the disk, might look suspicious and be something to report or fix. This isn’t the case with all products, but it is enough of a reason.
Think of your Antivirus as an inspector that each time you request an item will first pick this item up, inspect it for anything that might hurt you and then hands it over to you, IF it passes this inspection. If it doesn’t pass the inspection, the inspector can neutralize it – delete it, put it into quarantine or simply prevent it from working.
Now you hire two inspectors for the same job, and neither of one expects the other inspector to be there. They actually can’t even notice the other inspector, they can only inspect things and nothing else.
Now both those inspectors try to grab the same things to inspect them. This leads to several possible outcomes.
a) one of the inspectors doesn’t get the items “on time” and might decide this counts as a failed inspection, thus blocking that item from working (or deleting it or whatever)
b) both inspectors get the item, both inspect the item, doubling the inspection time.
c) both inspectors run into each other and end up fighting for who gets the item first, either bringing everything to a halt or just slowing everything down, however not doing their work.
d) one of the inspectors might try to inspect the other inspectors stuff. Usually inspectors protect their stuff so no one can meddle with their tools used to inspect items. The inspector inspecting the inspector would interpret this as suspicious and try to delete, quarantine or otherwise block the inspected inspector. The inspected inspector in turn would view this as a very malicious activity, and in turn try to delete or otherwise block the inspecting inspector.
You know the spiderman meme where there’s two of them pointing at each other? Basically that
One reason is because AV programs actually can have copies of viruses on them so they know what to look for, or at least hashes of viruses. The other program also has a list of known viruses. So they look at each other and see a bunch of viruses and freak out.
In the past anti virus programs heavily conflicted with each other often detecting the other as a virus and attempting to quarantine it.
A second reason was that they are resource intensive and having two would slow your system down.
A third reason was that one AV can cause the other AVs scanning engine to fail to detect because it keeps interfering with it.
These days AVs can detect each other, many can work alongside one another. You can run Avast with Windows Defender no problem.
I would want as little virus protection as possible that is still effective tbh.
Most antivirus software is actually inherently worse than the majority of computer virus out there. Its embedded in every part of your system, slows things down, prompts you 50x a day just to do trivial shit. Slows down startup, runs scans at extremely inopportune times, bothers you constantly. Open a game? Ding!!! This program is trying to access your harddrive! give it permission? YES. and it doesnt seem to give a shit how many times you check the DONT ASK ME AGAI box. etc. etc. etc. Its annoying as fuck. Running two programs? oh my god just kill me and throw my pc in the dumpster.
It can end up interupting each other. For example randomly turn each other off as a false positive
An anti-virus program acts as a virus or malicious code would. I remember my dad put Norton on a machine that already had Kaspersky. The two constantly quarantined each other.
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