UK BOINC Team Forum

I know a lot of people who use more than one antivirus scanner. The belt and braces approach is better than losing data to a stubborn virus!

thuldany wrote:Can a Trojan or virus hide from an online scanner?

Yes. Definitely - if that online scanner has not been updated to deal with that trojan. Viruses are being developed all the time and some scanners are better than others. In any case you should keep them up to date. Not that I do. I usually get caught by a virus and tell myself for a while to take more care and as always get lazy again and forget to keep tabs on whether my PCs are up to date.

melter65 wrote:I know a lot of people who use more than one antivirus scanner.

I've always understood that running two (or more) antivirus can cause problems. They use additional resources (eg disc activity with scanning twice) and can result in program conflicts and false virus alerts.

Cymek wrote:

melter65 wrote:I know a lot of people who use more than one antivirus scanner.

I've always understood that running two (or more) antivirus can cause problems. They use additional resources (eg disc activity with scanning twice) and can result in program conflicts and false virus alerts.

Yeah running more than one at the same time can cause problems so I just have my main AV software running then disable it to run the next before re-enabling it to run as default.
Never have more than one AV running at startup.

Sorry about the confusion, I meant using two different scanners, not having two antivirus programs running at the same time!

melter65 wrote:Sorry about the confusion, I meant using two different scanners, not having two antivirus programs running at the same time!

Yes, I can see that now. I've never thought about using two different scanners. Perhaps I'll try that sometime. Thanks for the thought.