Hello everyone!

[Wendykins]

Hi everybody, I have just joined. I have been using Spybot Search and Destroy for quite a while now (the free version) but it never occurred to me to actually join the forums. Anyway, I have now, which seems to make sense if I am using it.

I just have a few questions to start with. I am not sure whether this is the right forum to ask, if it is not, then perhaps somebody could kindly redirect me to the correct one?

I believe my first question has already been answered, pertaining to having your own avatar. I have seen the ones you have available. Am I allowed to pick one of those being a newbie? Am I allowed to upload one of my own? If so, how do I do this?

My next question is this. (more of a statement than a question ;-)

I ditched AVG for Microsoft Security Essentials. I also ditched Malwarebytes because I was getting an annoying balloon coming up in the bottom right hand corner of my taskbar every time I loaded up the computer relating to a problem with that program. I also joined the Malwarebytes forums where I spent ages with them trying to sort this problem and they could not sort out the problem either. I uninstalled it in the end as Microsoft Security Essentials, I was informed would be satisfactory without it.

This is my real question.

I still kept Spybot and Spywareblaster in conjunction with MSE yet MSE was advising that all other anti-virus and malware programs should be taken off before their product was installed. So the question is, do I seriously need to do this and will they all conflict with each other if I leave them all on my computer?

It does not seem to and I have not seen any adverse effects by having all three. The only thing I can think of is that I use Windows Speech Recognition. This seems to be very slow at times. Could, by using all three programs, this contribute towards a conflict to cause this problem???

Any advice on what I really should do would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

Wendykins