Norton 360 and Malwarebytes clashing

[gradus]

I have occasionally run the free version of Malwarebytes to clear out anything that Norton missed and up to now it has worked fine but after years of use I got a message saying my free Malwarebytes trial had ended and I needed to buy the Premium version if I wanted to continue with the product and, perhaps stupidly, I bought it. Now the pc has suddenly slowed up and I've only been able to resume normal service by uninstalling Premium Malwarebytes. Is there any convenient way of switching Malwarebytes on and off so that I can run scans occasionally as i used to do with the free version?
Grateful for advice.

[ChrisBennell]

There is advice available on the malwarebytes forum as follows:

https://forums.malwarebytes.org/index.php?/topic/52346-turning-it-off/

[Dave2002]

I can't really comment in detail, as these things are subject to variation. I have also tried to run multiple security tools from time to time, and they really can interfere with each other badly. Also, as you noted, they can slow your machine down to a snail's pace. This is often because two (or more!) sets of real time scanners get to work, and I also suspect (though have never been able to prove) that on PCs they really mess up the swap space, and tend to thrash the disc, as they pull a lot of the disc data into memory to check - this is not a good way to treat the file store.

You might find other tools do the occasional checks which you feel you need - so you could try CCleaner from Piriform, which is free. I certainly also used to find that useful for "fixing" registry problems. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCleaner You should be able to find the free download site for that easily enough. I used to find that it took about 3 sweeps to clear most registry issues.

Whether it did so well or not, I can't say, though usually there was an improvement afterwards.

Let's face it, when the machines are doing many millions of operations a second, one has to have a high degree of trust in the tools to be sure that there are no bugs or malinstructions lurking - even in tools which appear to be trustworthy and OK.

I did find some massive classhes between some security tools which were supposed to be good. One was Kaspersky, which I never managed to get installed in any compatible way, though reviews and tests suggested that it was/is a good tool. Sometimes, but perhaps not always, the problems are due to one tool discovering the virus database used by the other one, and then flagging just about everything as an issue.

[gradus]

Thanks to you both. As it appears there is a way to disable/enable Malwarebytes I 'll limit its use to periodic scannings but as CCleaner is free, give it a go too.
Thanks again.