Should you run more than one antivirus program at the same time?

Document ID: 2000031316555206 Last Modified:12/08/2005

Situation:
You have Norton AntiVirus and another antivirus program installed on your computer. You want to know whether you should run them both at the same time, or whether you should even have two antivirus programs installed.

Solution:
Symantec strongly recommends that you run only one antivirus program at a time. Having more than one antivirus program active in memory uses additional resources and can result in program conflicts and false virus alerts. Your best defense against computer viruses and malicious programs is to keep your virus definitions up to date, and run Norton AntiVirus Auto-Protect. If you choose to install more than one antivirus program on your computer, then only one of them should be active in memory at a time. (The Norton AntiVirus module that is active in memory is named Auto-Protect. Other antivirus programs will have different names for this function.)

If you are running a Microsoft operating system such as Windows, Microsoft has an even stronger recommendation. The following is quoted from the Microsoft Article 189264 Plus! 98: How to Remove McAfee VirusScan:

"Microsoft recommends that you have only one anti-virus program installed on your computer."

Product(s): Norton AntiVirus 2003, Norton AntiVirus 2003 Professional Edition, Norton AntiVirus 2004, Norton AntiVirus 2004 Professional, Norton AntiVirus 2005, Norton AntiVirus 2005 3 User License, Norton AntiVirus 2006
Operating System(s): Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP
Date Created: 03/13/2000