It's your choice. My personal thinking is not to be in too much of a hurry to uninstall Spybot, it is fairly old tech, and the apps. such as MBAM and SAS do seem overall better equipped for finding and removing modern malware threats, but S&D is still under active development and has a helpful forum, too. The developer is clearly very well motivated and has been doing this for quite a while.
The "little dude in the tray" will be the Teatimer, which guards against some registry changes. This can be useful. Sometimes it can create a confliction or problem with some other applications. If you have anything like this happen, turning the Teatimer off would be a good first troubleshooting step. If you have the "immunize" function in Spybot active, make sure that you remove it before uninstalling the program, if you choose to uninstall it.
(I have S&D installed, Teatimer and immunity off. Other Guards off. I keep it purely as a scanner.)
If you remove the immunity in S&D, you will notice that it also disables some of the SpywareBlaster entries, that should then be re-enabled.
SAS defaults to starting with Windows. The program claims this is recommended, because it is better able to protect itself from malware when running. (Seems reasonable. Never had a problem, myself.) Unless you have the realtime active, which means you've purchased it, I see little point in having it start with Windows, personally, but I just use it for demand scans (not that often) and update it only once a fortnight, or prior to scanning. This works for me, and may work for you, too. I treat MBAM in a similar fashion; updates for MBAM are a lot faster in my corner of the globe, so if I have any reason to run a demand scan, MBAM is usually the one I use first.
Of course Avast pay us for helping here, by giving us this excellent and problem free antivirus.
No cash changes hands.
It's actually quite clever of Avast to have provided this forum, where often the developers look and help too, and in the past, before I joined, the forum has developed this sort of aura of willing and non-judgmental help, with a lot of technical expertise. It has gained a reputation for being one of the best security forums on the net. My motivation (and I suspect others also) for helping here is that I had a lot of problems in the past when I started messing with computers (totally ignorant) and got a lot of free help, from several sites. There's a lot of very good quality free software around. Quite mind-blowing, really. So it's a kind of pay back for that. With the benefit of learning a heck of a lot from the folk who have seen and done a lot more, or different stuff than me. It has also become a bit of a hobby, for the interest value, and keeping up to date with what's going on with security and web stuff generally.
Other software producers have their own forums too, of course, and some of them are good. I guess the first few members of the Avast forum set the tone of the forum for all those that followed, and it's carried on. Pretty decent of them to set that example, doncha think?
