McAfee vs. Lavasoft

Terry George · External Since: Mar 04, 2006 Posts: 1

Lavasoft: All versions of Ad-Aware are compatible with all major anti-virus
and firewall solutions. Lavasoft recommends you to use anti-virus and
firewall software in addition to Ad-Aware to keep your computer safe.

McAfee: The fact is that the Security Products of two different Vendors
can't function properly on the same system at the same time. They conflict
with each other and especially their registry entries which are not deleted
even after uninstall of the program from Add/Remove Programs. So you can
keep only one of the two on your system.

Who is lying?

User: inactive Posts:

My line of expertise is computer security.

When tuning up a new PC, (one I've not seen before) the first thing I do is remove McAfee or Norton or both. They are both "Bloatware" and will slow down almost any system.

Then I install AVG 7.1 FREE (anti virus) and
AdAware SE/Personal
Spybot S&D
Spyware Blaster
Trojan Hunter (30 day free trial) to scan for Trojans
Windows Defender (only after explaining to customer that its a BETA)

None of the above mentioned programs actually RUN on a PC.
They are only active while you're doing either an Update or Scan.
Except the resident portion of Defender.
It plays well with all the others including AVG.

Using this "Package" of software, I've never seen any conflicts or slow-downs with their use.

It is common practice to NOT (as in NEVER) run two AV or Firewall programs at the same time. They will not strengthen each other, but they may fight with each other or other software trying to run.

I've found that AVG (anti virus) and ZoneAlarm (firewall) work well together. You do need to shut off email scanning in ZoneAlarm.

I hope that helps some....(someone, somewhere)

Cheers Shocked

greyknight17 · Joined: Feb 03, 2003 Posts: 5924 Location: Brooklyn, NY

Ditto on what TheShadow said. I never liked Norton or McAfee either...

To your question, McAfee is not making it clear what kind of security programs they are talking about. If antivirus and firewall, then yes, don't run more than one of each. If they are talking about using anti-spyware and anti-virus programs together that causes conflict, then I would say they are probably wrong. They shouldn't conflict each other. Use the programs at TheShadow has mentioned.

Lavasoft is right on the money there Very Happy

User: inactive Posts:

Hey Greyknight! What's shakin' dude?

How you like the new forum?

Cool

greyknight17 · Joined: Feb 03, 2003 Posts: 5924 Location: Brooklyn, NY

Nothing much...just lurking here and there Very Happy

Never liked phpBB...but what can I say...we all will have to adapt to it.

goretsky

Hello,

It depends on the specific functions performed by each security program.

Some security programs may provide passive forms of protection by disabling unneeded services, changing the security of settings within Windows so they are more restrictive, blocking access to sites known to spread malicious software via the Windows System Registry or hosts file and so forth. Generally speaking, these programs are run periodically, perform a specific action and exit.

Other programs may perform active forms of protection by continuously running in the background and monitoring access to files, web sites and other vectors for entry of malicious code into your system. These stay resident in the computer's memory as a type of background process called a service, installed as a virtual device driver (just like a device driver for hardware--except that instead of connecting the piece of hardware to the operating system, they connect a program to the operating system), installed into the computer's network stack as kind of an NDIS wrapper or implemented as a LSP (as kind of an additional all-encompassing protocol) in the Windows socket library, or using even other means.

The problem with the latter approach is they to be exclusive functions: Having two (or more) anti-virus programs trying to intercept the same disk, file or network activity can lead to performance slowdowns, difficult-to-isolate system conflicts and even instability leading to crashes.

The key to preventing problems is to determine which components are safe to use together, which are mutually-exclusive and then configure the various anti-virus programs so they do not interfere with each others operations.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky