Slightly Confused

Avast has, it seems, a well thought of and standards compliant anti spyware capability. Many people when listing their systems seem to have additional anti-spyware programs (along with anti-malware and anti-adware). Other than premise that two or more programs doing the same job may plug a slight gap in anyone of them - are these necessary? After all you wouldn’t have two virus checkers and two firewalls running at the same time, would you?

Many thanks

Antispyware could, generally, run side-by-side with antivirus.
We, generally, use them (MBAM, SAS, SpywareTerminator, Spybot for others…) as a second, non-resident, scanner.
Not a software is perfect and sometimes (specially MBAM) they caught something missed by avast.

The main consideration is that you don’t have more than one resident program for each category, anti-virus or anti-spyware. Firewalls being a different beast as they have to be resident, so only one resident, running.

Adding other on-demand applications shouldn’t conflict but compliment (periodic back-up scan by the on-demand scanners), but you should choose wisely and those signatures are a good start.

I don’t think the name matters that much. If it is a resident scanner scanning for some samples then problems may appear. Even when both products are well written and no interoperability problems are present just from the mere fact that they are installed together, when they both happen to detect one particular file the whole system may stop working or the file could be missed or anything else.

So I would rephrase that: antispyware could generally run side-by-side if it does not use resident protection, or if there is certitude that they never catch the same file.

The fact that one would report that as virus and the other as spyware and the third one as unwanted program is of a little significance.

Thanks for the explanation/correction Lukas.