If you have an antivirus program like Norton, do you need an antispyware program as well?

Malware is a generic term for all damaging/dangerous applications, spywares are a subcathegory of the former.

By the way, if you have Norton, you should consider changing it because it’s objectively one of the worst antivirus programs on the market. And that’s saying something considering that antivirii as a whole are pretty useless.

I totally agree with @Thammuz Norton is a piece of garbage that lags down your system REALLY bad, gives false positives, expires in a year, and doesn’t work with many common virii. Uninstall Norton EVERYTHING that’s on your computer and download Avast which is free, lightweight, and detects pretty much anything you’ll ever have problems with…minus the false positives. Then no worries

AVG also works pretty well, or Avira.

One way to explain the difference is to equate it with real-world security, Now, would you bother to lock your car doors if you leave the windows rolled completely down? Think of the door as a good anti-virus program and the window as a good anti-spyware program; you need both to keep people out of where they don’t belong.

Avira is proven to work and is among the best AV programs at any price. AV-Comparatives backs me up on this, and while @Thammuz exaggerates a bit, the truth is that Norton really isn’t all that great, though both are still provably better than AVG.

@Thammuz AVG bears the distinction of being the only AV program to let one slip through and infect my system.

@jerv Really? I never had problems with AVG. Then again if it lets shit through i guess there’s no way to tell until you use another one. I was going to try Avira pretty soon, i guess i’ll move “pretty soon” to “today”