Do I need antivirus software to start with?

We always recommend running a good quality antivirus software on your machines for your protection, even having a free antivirus software is better than not having any at all.

So surely having two antivirus programs would be better than one?

Not necessarily! If anything, running multiple antiviruses will often causes more problems and have a detrimental effect on your machine’s performance than just one would.

How so? As surely more protection would cover more things?

The main two issues that running two antivirus programs at the same time is that they would both be competing for the same computing power and also fighting to do the same jobs as each other.

By having two antivirus programs running at the same time, which would both be running in the background together, that means that each one is taking up part of your computer’s resources increasing the load on it and therefore slowing the performance of your machine down. This load could be increased even more as the two antivirus programs compete with each other to do the same task.

With each antivirus program trying to compete and do the same task as each other such as a risk of damage to system files or increased use of resources to do certain tasks in which each antivirus does in a way think it knows best that can lead to crashing or freezing.

This is especially noticeable should any kind of threat be found as both programs will be trying to deal with the same threat in potentially different ways leading to each other being unable to do what it needs and potentially lead to things such as system errors and crashing as it will also have led to a major drain on the machine’s available resources.

How do I know if I’m running more than one antivirus?

Many off-the-shelf machines come with an antivirus program installed, often in the form of a trial to get you to purchase it once it has run out. Many users will often not want to take this offer up and instead put their own preferred antivirus on but not install the current one at the same time. By looking in your list of installed programs in your computer settings you will see all installed programs listed, some of the programs listed may be obvious antivirus ones and some not so obvious. A quick google search of the not so obvious ones will reveal if they are or not.

One thing to look out for though are sometimes fake antivirus programs listed in there which may be malware, again a quick google search of these will reveal more information about them. We then suggest removal/uninstallation of all of these along with any other antivirus software other than the one that you plan to use.

So what do you recommend?

We recommend using a good quality antivirus solution at all times. There are many free ones around which give good basic protection in the return of having to tolerate a few pop up adverts for it, alternatively there are many good paid for antivirus packages around which have far more features than free versions including things such as cloud storage, banking tools, vpns etc.

We are stockists of Norton antivirus which is always in stock in our shop and is a package we advise strongly. It is very easy to set up however we are always willing to help if any help is needed.