Avast plus too many others?

General Topics
1

I have Avast, Defender and ThreatFire active on my XP Home. I also have Windows Firewall, SpywareBlaster and the Hosts file of SpyBot installed.

Since installing ThreatFire the compuer has gone rather slow. Do you think so many programmes might conflict with each other?

Thank you

qim

2

Yes, if running simultaneously (…might).
Just because a program is installed doesn’t mean it will slow it down. If the program or a module of it is running, in particular, AV / malware / adware / firewall programs, probably.
You will need to check the Processes tab of Windows Task Manager to see most of what’s running.

3

Thanks

But I am more concerned now with possible conflicts rather than slow-down. Do these programmes conflict with each other?

qim

4

There are some concerns with the latest threatfire when using firefox, some have had problems with their firefox add-on not working or not working as they should.

SpywareBlaster shouldn’t conflict with anything it is passive. Spybot, would depend on if you have the tea-timer resident function enabled. I have never been a fan of windows defender, I also don’t use a HIPS program.

However, you only have the windows firewall which I wouldn’t call a firewall. So personally I think you should beef up your firewall, now the comodo firewall has a HIPS element in the Defence+ I believe, so with that you could pass on the threatfire as you don’t want multiple HIPS which might conflict.

Whilst the windows XP firewall is usually good at keeping your ports stealthed (hidden) it provides no outbound protection and you should consider a third party firewall.

Any malware that manages to get past your defences will have free reign to connect to the internet to either download more of the same, pass your personal data (sensitive or otherwise, user names, passwords, keylogger retrieved data, etc.) or open a backdoor to your computer, so outbound protection is essential.

  • There are many freeware firewalls such as, Comodo, PCTools Firewall Plus, Jetico, etc. - Zone Alarm free works fine with avast and has a reasonably friendly user interface, however, the free version is becoming bloated with trial ware and is also crippled as far as outbound protection goes In the Program Control, configuration area, the slider will only goes as far as Medium protection, if you want more you have to buy the Pro version.

See A Forum discussion on free firewalls http://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=30808.0
See http://www.matousec.com/projects/firewall-challenge/results.php.

5

Thanks!

6

I’ve elected to uninstall Threatfire until they sort the issues out.
It’s a good application, nice additional layer, and in version 3.5 ran well with Avast - no conflicts - but I have had various niggly problems with it, especially updating, in version 4.
That said, it shouldn’t actually conflict, and some folk seem to be OK with it, unfortunately I’m not one of them.
Avast has run reliably throughout.