It’s always good practice to install anti-virus and make sure that it is constantly updated; however running more than one anti-virus program on your computer at the same time can have negative effects on the security and performance of your system, and is not recommended. You may think that you have increased protection, but many of these programs can conflict with each other, which may leave you with effectively no protection whatsoever. Furthermore, the extra burden of running multiple anti-virus programs has on system resources such as the hard drive, memory and CPU is substantial. Your computer will usually grind to a halt under the extreme demand being forced on it.
However, if you require extra protection because you are not entirely confident with your current protection, and would perhaps like a second opinion, there are alternatives to installing another anti-virus program on your computer. That alternative is online antivirus scanners.
These free scanners require no installation. They will simply run as an add-on to your internet browser that will scan your system without disrupting your current protection. They are designed to work around your current configuration.
The add-on allows the online malware scanners to be browser independent, which means that it doesn’t matter whether you’re using Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or another browser, the online malware scanners are designed to work with all of them.
Online virus scanners are useful in many situations. You may have recently suffered from a virus on your PC that your current anti-virus solution has eradicated, it might be best to get a second opinion and to check if there are any more viruses your current protection failed to detect. Perhaps you have downloaded a file you suspect is suspicious and you wish to scan it with an online malware scanner.
Online malware scanners can offer you the same, if not increased flexibility over your installed protection, with full scan, quick scan, individual file scan, and many more options, whilst using minimal system resources to automatically remove or warn you of infections on your system.
With online malware scanners you can be sure that it will detect and destroy the latest viruses, as the virus database is updated constantly. Some of these solutions will even alert you if your current protection is out of date.
There are many online scanners available from all of the major anti-virus companies, including AVG, BitDefender, Kaspersky and many more!
Note: Because online scanners do not offer real-time protection, they should never be used as your main antivirus solution, only to complement your existing protection.
