Norton 2005 Slowing my pc down

[nitestalker49]

I have recently had 14 viruses found on my pc in less than three hours.... not quite sure where i get them all but damn. So I used Norton 2005 software to remove and fix. Now that this has all been completed and everything seems to be running fine. I have found that my computer is so slow I can barely stand it.

Is there anyone out there using good antivirus software that wont slow your system down dramatically?

[redwudz]

I'm not a fan of Norton, I use the freeware AVG antivirus now. I also use Spybot S&D.

But even with Norton, you should be able to adjust some of the scan settings. If it scans everything you open, every time you open it, that will definitely slow things down.

I set AVG to do a full scan once a day in the morning when I'm not doing much of anything with the computer. That way it's less intrusive.

[meridklt]

Are you sure Norton is slowing your computer down as I use it with no problems at all.

Have you tried disablling all references to Norton from your Startup to check that it is indeed Norton that is slowing things down.

[nitestalker49]

according to all the settings there was nothing that was supposedly going to be running..........but it sure seem like something was running to me. and the items in the task manager related to Norton would not end task.... I have been althrough Norton and read as many forums as i could find and tutorials and no matter what it seems to run like @#$#@.

[waheed]

As you stated, you had 14 viruses on your PC, even though you may have removed them, there is a possibly that your PC has been slowed down due to the damage already done by those viruses.

Ive had viruses, trogans etc... mess up my PC in the past and even after removing them, my PC never fully recovered. I kept getting system crashes quite often, untill I did a clean install of Windows.

Try uninstalling norton and see if that makes any difference.

[nitestalker49]

I uninstalled Norton and it made a big difference. I beleive the difference would be approx. 80% but I did find some damaged files that are in locations I have never messed with. Pretty intense, so I am backing everything up and going to do a fresh reinstall after formatting.

[jollyjohn]

G'day
Try this free antispyware antiadware. Ewido Security Suite v3.5 Download from http://www.ewido.net/en/download/
Inatall and fpdate. if you have problems updating update it form here http://www.ewido.net/en/download/updates/
Do a full system scan.
Ewido offers a FREE 14 day full working trial. After the 14 day trial the only option that will be disabled is the "real-time" scanning and the automatic updating. You will have to do the updating manually by clicking on the “update button” and then “start update”.
You'll be amazed.
Regards
John

[sanjayk]

Another vote for AVG free version. I have been using it for long time without any hassels. I recommend dump Norton forever.

[jhotmann]

I also vote AVG. Free, fast, and reliable...it cant get any better than that

[guns1inger]

I have used Norton's without any problems for years. I have also used AVG on some systems, and Avast! free version on some systems. I have found AVG to be reasonable for virus detection, and Avast! to be slightly better most of the time. Avast also picks up items on the fringe of spyware/trojans that AVG doesn't. But I wouldn't use either of them in place of Norton.

That said, I have seen Norton go belly up on other machines. In those cases, probably 80% of the time it has been down to something to user did. A reinstall usually fixes things.

I am surprised that you even noticed it running on your system, as I have run it on slower systems, and only noticed it when it was actually scanning (which I scheduled for a period when I was doing other things anyway).

Norton's seems to be a bit like Microsoft - software people love to hate for no other reason.

[rallynavvie]

I run the entire SystemWorks suite on all my workstations and I've never seen any difference with or without it. I've disabled it (kept it from loading at all) to see if it affected encoding times once and it didn't yield any difference whatsoever. I didn't tweak much at all in the settings other than to disable internet worm protection because it became annoying after flagging every other email. I mean you have to be pretty dumb to open a worm on your PC anyway.

All of our ancient machines at work run Norton as well and you'd probably notice it more on a 1.6 Celeron with 256MB RAM. I mean they're slow, but about as slow as what I'd expect them to be.

One thing to certainly look out for is enabling a background virus scan. Norton's version of "background" is to bring your computer to its knees while performing the scan. It's not so much dragging your CPU as it is really slowing down your hard drive performance which is very noticeable. Even my SMP systems wouldn't be immune to that sort of performance hit. I schedule my full virus scans to go off early in the AM once weekly.