How much Virus protection is too much?

My wife bought me a new HP laptop for my birthday, running Windows 10. Obviously it has Windows Defender installed, but I also routinely install the free version of Avast. Shortly after I did this, she forwarded me an e:mail from Best Buy, where she made the purchase telling me I also got a free year of Webroot Anti-virus. Should I install that as well? Should I uninstall Avast? I used to hear that having two different anti-virus softwares installed can actually work against you. Looking for advice.

Standard advice still is to avoid possible conflicts between anti-virus applications and therefore pick just one.

Malwarebytes doesn't conflict with any others are far as I know, so many here use it in combination with Defender, Norton, Avast, whatever.

McAfee is usually the one most people here would say to avoid at all costs.

Defender is probably the most common recommendation here.

You should use only one antivirus at a time, never two.

Having multiple active AV programs has never been recommended. The results of doing this are unpredictable but include reduced performance, system instability and reduced protection. Yes, reduced protection.

Normal programs are designed to work together without conflict. In fact unless a program does some unusual things it wouldn't even be aware that other programs are running. The system is designed this way. But AV programs are not normal. Normal programs do not monitor the disk access by other programs or access their memory. Malware may do this but AV programs must do these things if they are to do their job.

Windows Defender will normally disable it's own background scanning if another AV program that does this is detected. This must be done very carefully if it is to avoid being fooled by malware that would very much like to disable such scanning. Other AV products may not be able to do this.

I am happy with Defender myself, and Malware Bytes. Never had a problem I know of. Scans almost 100% of the time revel zilch, nothing, very occasionally PUP

Ronman189 said:

Should I uninstall Avast?

Yes.

Thanks for all the responses. guys. I deleted Avast. I had already installed Spyblaster and Malwarebytes.