New to Avast

I just started using Avast yesterday. I had been using MS Security Essentials. I thought I would check out Avast. I noticed that the Windows Defender Icon showed up in Systray to notify that the def. were out of date. I have Defender disabled since I was using MSE. I downloaded update to get rid of icon. Now, should I start using Defender again? I thought Avast protects against malware too. I also use MBAM free as scanner only. What should I do? Thanks. I hope to be a long time user. I am using Vista SP2 32 bit.

Welcome to Avast! forum.

A lot of Avast! users here tend to deactivate WD. Your are good only with Avast! and MBAM as a second on demand scanner.

As iroc9555 said, you are good with only one real-time scanner. I highly recommend that you turn Windows Defender off, it might cause some compatibility issues with avast!

Ok Thanks…I noticed another problem. Avast seemed to disabled MS Security Center. It wont turn back on. I know this is Avast doing it since everything was fine before installing Avast. Maybe I should try another AV or go back to MSE,

Use MSE procedure and remove tool to uninstall completely.

http://singularlabs.com/uninstallers/security-software/

Reboot and see if MS Security Center is back.

I already uninstalled MSE completely. I did this before installing Avast.

Update…after a lot of testing, installing, and uninstalling, I discovered the problem with the security center was revouninstaller and MS Security Essentials. I used Revo to uninstall MSE and it deleted registry keys related to the security center. Fortunately, I made an image of my hard drive before I made changes. I just restored the image and I did not allow Revo to delete the keys again. I then reinstalled Avast and everything is fine. Avast is running and security center is running and it recognizes Avast. I chose not to installed the additional plugins though, since I was not familiar with them.

I did have a couple of false positives though. I sent them to Avast for additional analysis. I also uploaded them to virustotal and only 2 or 3 scanners reported a threat…that is why I believe they are false positives, but I did move them to the virus chest for now. I hope to really enjoy this program for years to come. I really like that Avast doesn’t install a bunch of other utilities to try to get you to pay for them like AVG. Please don’t start doing that.

I am glad you are back in business and Avast! is running well.

This is a good example why not to use RevoUninstaller for security programs.

More than that… Even common programs that require a boot to uninstall could have problems with Revo.