How often do you carry out a scan?

[anotheoldgit]

Thanks for all your previous help, I now have AVG 2011 and Malware on my computer.

In addition to these two I have Spybot Search & Destroy, Ad-Aware and CCleaner.

How often should one put these items into operation?

And should one carry out full scans or quick scans?

[bella46]

It depends I suppose on what pops up on your computer, having had some very odd things trying to get through my firewall, I tend to carry out a full sweep and clean up of files about every 3 days.

[AlBags]

That's well over the top .. to the extent of being paranoid.
Adaware is so unfriendly now, with a slow interface and loads of entries (let alone the permanent background services) I got rid.
PAID for AVG .. Avast .. Norton ... Avira ... fine.
Malwarebytes .. registered ... Fine
CCleaner ... Fine.
Norton does constant (idle time) background work. Scan once every 2 weeks maybe.
Malwarebytes .. Start with Windows or switch that off and scan once a week maybe. Do a system scan more often.

[boxtops]

A friend put Adaware on for us and it messed our other settings so we took it off again pdq.

We now have Norton and it scans all the time as Albags says, and we do a full system scan every couple of weeks.

[AlBags]

People slate Norton .. It did used to be large, consume a lot of resources .. and could be trouble. Since 2009 it has been re-written and now uses very little system resources.
I've been on 2010 for several months with no issues at all.
It's using about 18Mb of memory at the moment .. which is pretty little.

[AlBags]

Well if you switch OFF System Restore before Malwarebytes and a full scan, they will have a chance to get rid of it.
Then switch on again afterwards.
Wish people would realise that System Restore protects malware and virii/trojans by allowing them to replicate themselves.