Norton Anti-Virus Slows download speed

[jeex]

i recently installed Norton Anti-Virus (I do a virus sweep about one every quarter, clean as usual).. and i noticed during the scan that my download speed dropped about 75%.. this was while NAV was enabled, if i disabled it (& killed it in the TM) my download speeds went back to normal.

it seems kind of weird to me.. i'm sharing internet access with 2 other computers, xbox & ps2.. none of them are using bandwith.. and if there were a virus that was doing this i'm guessing norton would have picked up on it.. virus free, spyware free, windows updated.

anyone got any idea's?

[redwudz]

I know when Norton is doing a full scan, you'd best not be trying to use the computer because it uses a lot of resources, especially tying up the HD. I just installed the latest version of Norton and I like it. It usually operates in the background except during system scans. A friend of my had McAfee and it would slow the computer to a crawl everytime he accessed any program. Turned out it was scanning every single file that was accessed. I like Norton's method better.

[gitreel]

I have been a loyal mcafee fan for years, and that is not the case about slowing the computer down. The last two versions would provide realtime protection and did not slow my computer down at all. I had been using Mcafee since version 6. I had also used the last two fullblown versions of internet security. I think your friends problem was just with his computer.

[sterno]

If Norton is doing a full system scan it's pretty much hammering your hard drive. It'll also load down the CPU doing the scan, plus it will use up some of your PCI bus bandwidth. With all three of those it's not surprising that you take a big performance hit.

How badly mcafee will degrade system performance depends on the software you're running and on how fast your machine is - it's not always noticable. Overall, Mcafee Antivirus is a buggy piece of unreliable garbage and has been for as long as I've had to deal with it. I found that mcafee reduced the transfer rates with some FTP clients to less than one tenth of what they should have been. Since the company policy was to use it I just disabled it when I needed to ftp files around and reenabled it after.

[gitreel]

Overall, Mcafee Antivirus is a buggy piece of unreliable garbage

That is your opion. I have never had a problem, like I stated before.

Just because you did not like it, does not mean it is unreliable garbage.

[jeex]

i had performed a full system scan, and then it was doing its usual background business, but the download speeds were still pititful.

[gmatov]

I don't know what your problem is, but I have Systemworks 2003 full install, every byte is scanned, in and out, and my last large DL, from a good FTP site was over 300 kilobytes per second. KBs, not kbs.

It is not Norton, per se.

Cheers,

George

[redwudz]

I did a Google search on 'norton slowing down internet access' and it came back with some hits, but they seemed to be about Norton System Works. I tried that a while back when it came with a MB and I got rid of it quick because nothing but problems. I believe that mostly concerned the firewall and it wanting to tell me to be careful everytime I tried to download anything. Got irritating, so I dumped it. But I have never had problems with Norton Antivirus as far as download speeds. Maybe a reconfigure of Norton options would help?

[jeex]

i only keep nortons on my system for a couple of days anyways. its not that big of a deal, but its just annoying..

i'm not sure how nortons could do this, espcially considering that i've got my internet access going through my linksys (befsr41) router/firewall..

[northcat_8]

Norton sucks IMO. If you don't require round the clock protection and only scan your computer ever so often, I suggest www.trendmicro.com
since I found trend I have gotten rid of Norton all together and I don't run any anti-virus software at all. I do run a firewall but that's all the protection I have and the only virus I have had in the past 2 years was the sasser virus because my daughter shut the firewall down for whatever reason.

I scan about every 2 weeks at trend, it's free. At the site it will download the scan engine and virus definitions and if you are on a dial up this can take a little bit, but broadband is pretty quick. And if it finds a virus, you can double click the virus name (its a link) and it takes you to a page that gives you all the details about the virus, how it travels, and more importantly how to remove it, all the way down to registry edits.

[awlchu]

I just noticed this too today on my machine.

It wasn't NAV but the personel firewall. I proved this by disabling each one separately and trying to connect to my favorite site (mmmmm videohelp.com).

I noticed my web access (with s/w firewall enabled) repaint (display) time went down the shitter. Pages that would normally load in < 1sec were taking 5, 10, or 20 secs to load. And I don't believe it was a network traffic issue.

So my workaround was to turn off Norton Personel Firewall and turn on my router NAT firewall (h/w firewall). I still leave NAV running without a problem.

Now speeds are back to respectable rates.

Unsure what will break will this change (internet game playing perhaps?) but I don't care, it's only low % of the time I on play on the internet.

[The village idiot]

Free version of AVG from http://www.grisoft.com. Only time I turn it off is when capturing to that computer. Hasn't let me down yet after several years of use (and updates)