If the app is installed into any partition, it will be allowed to run in the background if the installer gets your permission to configure it to do so. You have NO CLUE what the installer that requests elevation is doing to your PC… so you must place trust in the author/seller. Unless, of course, you mean some sort of a partition you take offline most of the time, but you never mentioned doing so.
TL;DR Location of install has no bearing on the program’s [background] abilities.
I think @RealTDog is just saying he keeps some portable AV apps on a second partition to run as needed. This avoids the hassle of needing to clean up an install that may have installed files all over the file system and have registry entries.
Ah, I see. That makes more sense.
Yep, that is what I meant!
WRT to the comment about premium gas, you’re right unless your car is made for it then it’s a big difference. Now, how that can relate to computers I’m not sure haha. I don’t think there are computers made to run with antivirus but I could be wrong.
What I take away from this thread is a sense of surprise that people actually still use antivirus. I haven’t used anything but Windows built in protection for probably a decade and I use nothing on my MacBook. My assumption is that most ppl here are pretty tech savvy which just increased my surprise about the AVs. I think if you have a firewall, use Chrome/Firefox especially with an ad blocker, use email via some half decent provider like google or MS, don’t us an admin account on your computer and then just practice good hygiene everything is fine.
Honestly, there is no need for anything more than that.
Agreed that the built-in Security has a good reputation these days. With that and the free version of Malwarebytes for running manual scans occasionally, most people are covered for everything they need.
That said, I do have Norton on all my Windows machines, but it’s kind of by accident. I sometimes have to use my own laptop at client sites, and if it’s going to be connected to their network it helps to be able to show that it’s patched up to date and running an AV they have confidence in. Majority of the firms I’ve been at run Norton on their corporate machines, so that was my choice for simplicity.
The best deal I’ve had when buying it has consistently been a multi-PC licence on Amazon, so I’ve used the spare licences for other machines. It has been useful on one machine that I tend to poke into dark corners, in that it slaps down the scripts in those places very quickly and efficiently. At the same time it’s no longer the resource hog that it used to be after a ground-up rewrite of the core code they did some years ago.
But if I didn’t have those particular circumstances, I’d be happy to rely on the built in Windows Security now.
I’ve pretty much used all of the major anti-virus programs over the years, but our family has been loyal to ESET NOD32 Smart Security and now Internet Security for over a decade now. Simply put - it just works and works really well. It has extra features that Windows Defender does not, and as a power user I appreciate that, and have more peace of mind.
That said, if cost is an issue, I have nothing against Windows Defender if all someone is doing is checking their email, Google searches, and going to reputable websites. Mom used Defender for a couple of years before I decided to switch her over to NOD32.
Eset’s Online Scanner is also very good for one-off scans, especially if you’re trying to clean up somebody else’s PC for them if something has got past the usual defences. Or if they’re running XP without any antivirus, the list of what it finds can be a very powerful argument for moving to something newer and more secure. 
I agree, I’m rather surprised too.
Out of curiosity I ran this scan on the machine I use everyday and it has been in use for about a year or two. I have never done anything special to protect it, just let windows and chrome do their automatic updates.
Admittedly, I rarely get adventurous on the internet and stick to fairly well known sites.
I just did a quick scan and it found nothing. I will start a full scan and see what it says in the morning…Scratch that. It won’t run a second time (it crashes silently). My opinion on antivirus has not improved after this experience.
I was just catching up with a non-TWiT podcast from a group of security industry veterans where they touched on the topic of Windows security. They all agreed that for non-enterprise use, a fully patched Windows 10 system with the Microsoft security and firewall would be good enough to keep out the sort of threats a home user would face. They were particularly agreed that this represented a significant improvement over what was available in Windows 7.
More reinforcement of what Leo’s been telling us all along.
Once Security Essentials became available on Windows 7, I stopped using third party AV. It was good enough and didn’t bog down the system.
I was looking at my WIndows PC today - I hardly use it.
It seems that I can manually scan with WIndows Defender. But, after poking around the settings - I cannot turn on real time protection.
It claims I have another AV software installed. I do not. I uninstalled norton using the norton removal tool. I did it a 2nd time just to see. For some reason, it will not run that feature. Rather annoying…
The only other thing on it is Malware Bytes.
In order to prevent your system from getting in an infinite loop, Windows has some registry entry or something for who “owns” real time scanning. There can only be one owner. Either Norton didn’t erase itself properly, or it’s your other softare, Malware Bytes. Look in its settings and see if you can turn that off and then see if Windows Defender will let you turn it on.
I did see some technique that MIGHT work online when I looked into it - but I wasn’t sure if I was going to get into all that. It was rather complicated.
I’ve occasionally seen a clash between Norton and MalwareBytes on my Win 10 systems. Even though the latter is the free version without automated scanning or realtime protection, it does have a background task running. In my case it was stopping Norton from upgrading because it thought another AV task was running. Opening Task Manager and killing the MalwareBytes task allowed the update to proceed. So it might be worth seeing whether you have a MB task running, and whether killing it allows you to set Defender active. Rebooting the PC should set MB back to its normal state, and it would be interesting to see if Defender would stay active in that case.
Thanks. I will give that a shot
Don’t use AV on Mac, Windows or Linux - no problems - stay out of Web hellholes 
I don’t understand peoples needs to hold on to the past with Windows? You don’t need to have 3 AV’s. Windows 10 is not the same as it was back when you needed to have 3rd party AVs. Microsoft has been beefing up security with each version of Windows since Windows XP service pack 2. The attack vectors are past the point and are different from the past when you needed 3rd party AV’s that were the primary software defense. What you should be focusing on is making sure your getting the security updates for the OS and your updating the browser your using to its current modern versions when they come out and just accept the built in OS AV (Defender). The OS and the browser are the first line of defense now period and they remain so from now into the future, if you keep them updated then your system is much harder to get in to and not seen online from the bad guy scans or bad websites.