Do I have a prolem -- running both McAfee, Norton, or other antivirus/spam programs?

Edmu

New Member
I've been a long-time McAfee paying client. I leave my PC on and McAfee, set for automatic upgrading.

Recently Norton for free was installed, part of a down-load package. This afternoon it popped up.

I have also detected Microsoft as running some manner of virus control including firewall.

How do I know whether these programs are congenial or competing, or clashing?

I've also heard of other programs, some said to be both preferable and free.

What's best for an amatuer retiered senior who just wants a good working computer for wordprocessing, photos, and web-surfing?

I would appreciate some expert enlightenment.

Cheers! Edmu
 
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You are only supposed to have 1 active running virus program at a time. You can use as many on demand scanners as you want, but only one should be active at bootup as having more than will cause issues. If you are gonna stay with Mcafee, make sure you have enough system memory as it is a resource hog. If you have XP have at least 2gb, if Vista then 3gb.
 
Edmu, I hope you haven't got those anti virus programs installed and running at the same time, there will be conflicts with more than one anti virus and your system will slow to a crawl. Regarding malware programs it is not such an issue.
Mcafee can be heavy on resources and any but the latest version of Norton will be also. A lot of users here recommend AVG or Kapersky and if you use a "Security suite" it will look after viruses, malware and install it's own firewall whilst disabling the windows one.

CCleaner is also a free excellent history, cookie and crap cleaner that ought to be run regularly.

EDIT: didn't see John had already replied :)
 
You cannot have more than 1 Antivirus software pachage installed at the same time, otherwise they will conflict

McAfee and Norton are not free, and also tend to be a bit high on system resource. Whilst Norton has had new deelopments with improved system performance, it still has many individual startups and therefore both of these paid Antivirus I do not feel are worth it.

If you decide to uninstall both Norton and McAfee Antivirus, you are also advised to run the associated Removal Tools (as they both don't usually uninstall everything normally.
McAfee Removal Tool
Norton Removal tool

An alternative Antivirus that I recommend is Avira free Antivirus
 
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