MULTICORE ANTIVIRUS

What do you think guys about multicore antiviruses?? I’m talking about GDATA (avast+ bitdefender scan engines), HITMAN PRO (g data, nod32, avira, prevx, a squared) and MULTICORE ANTIVIRUS=> 3 different scan engines for viruses (avg, norman and f-prot) and 2 for spyware (lavasoft and sunbelt). The last one is very interesting in my opinion, every single scan engine works togheter with others at the same time to guarantee the best real time protection and prevention.
Since these products are not expansive, they could reach a good market feedback…I’m still using avast ovviously… ;D
Did someone of you try a similar product?? are they actually more effective??

They have their place but they also have their drawbacks, consume more resources and are more likely to suffer a system performance hit. If there is a problem with the main interface or integration of the AVs then you don’t have even one. So for me I prefer the multi-application approach to security.

I wasn’t too impressed with the time I tried hitmanpro as on-demand, whilst I didn’t expect it to find anything, all it did find were false positives and I reported both, over a week later they weren’t resolved. So I don’t know if that is a) identifying which element detected it and b) them having to contact multiple companies to correct the FP.

If it is lavasoft’s adaware, I feel this is a much depreciated anti-spyware.

On the other hand a multi-application approach could cause compatibility problems, if you keep more than one program with real time scanner enabled…and then, you have to install at least 3 different security software (antivirus plus 2 good antispyware at least)…I was looking at youtube tests…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0HuwHvjPfc

Its diveded in three parts…peghorse is quite scrupulous ;D

Not when chosen carefully and never more than one resident anti-virus (and the same for resident anti-spyware), you can have multiple on-demand AVs or anti-spyware as back-up scans without conflict.

I never visit youtube, pointless on dial-up.

I think there is potential providing the resource consumption is reasonable. If antimalware vendors would collaborate more it would be a safer internet.

The closest I’ve actually used is A-Squared Free which includes the Ikarus antivirus engine (demand scanners only). They worked fine together, but both had many false positives which were quickly corrected once reported. I still use the portable version for an occasional scan.

I tried GDATA recently and it is outstanding with Avast and BitDefender engines. I liked its GUI also (not nearly as nice as Avast’s but much nicer GUI for experienced users than most AV GUI that are highly simplistic). The problem with it is that support is non-existent. I found a major bug that was reproducible. I wrote it all up for them and sent email to support and never got any reply. So, I uninstalled it.

avast! 5.0 is heavily multithreaded and can use up to 12 (or was it 16?) threads to scan files. So, if you have a shiny new Core i7 processor, it can utilize 8 threads (4 physical, 4 virtual).

This is not the case that we’re discussing in this thread. We’re talking about multi scanning engines rather than parellel processing.

I think that I read somewhere in the forum while Avast 5 was being tested as beta that what matter more for Avast 5 is the speed of the Hard Disk…

The faster the HD, the faster the scanning