The standard advice is that you shouldn’t have real-time scanning enabled for two antivirus programs enabled at once. The problem is that your main antivirus program is already functioning in this way. Malwarebytes will run in the background, scanning your system and files you open for problems and preventing them from taking root on your system in the first place. The paid version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Premium also contains real-time scanning features. With this option disabled, Malwarebytes won’t register itself as the system’s security application and both Malwarebytes and Windows Defender will run at the same time. Here’s how: In Malwarebytes, open Settings, click the “Security” tab, and disable the “Always register Malwarebytes in the Windows Security Center” option. You can still run both at once if you like. In other words, it will handle all your anti-malware scanning and Windows Defender (or whatever other antivirus you have installed) won’t run in the background. Starting with Malwarebytes 4, the Premium version of Malwarebytes now registers itself as the system’s security program by default. But even this shouldn’t be necessary, and we’ve never heard of anyone encountering a problem like this one. If Malwarebytes reports some sort of error removing a piece of malware it finds, you could potentially pause or disable real-time scanning in your main antivirus program to prevent it from interfering, and then reenable real-time scanning right after. You shouldn’t have to do any extra configuration here. Using an anti-malware program as an on-demand scanner is a safe way to get a second opinion. Just install it and occasionally launch it to perform a scan and check for the “potentially unwanted programs” almost no one actually wants.

This version of Malwarebytes shouldn’t interfere with your antivirus program at all. Instead, it only does something when you launch it and click the Scan button. In other words, it doesn’t run automatically in the background. The standard, free version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware just functions as an on-demand scanner.

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