the difference between anti-spy,anti-malware and anti-virus?

[Ruan942]

anti spy is aimed at spyware
anti malware is aimed at malware meaning everything that tries to do harm to your PC
anti virus can be all of them at once, but is mainly aimed at viruses.

Antivirus has background scanning, but some anti malware and anti spy has it too.

As long as there is only 1 anti malware application doing background scanning, it is ok to have more than 1.