This is somewhat typical of the name brand AV packages. At work, we use
McAfee Enterprise 7.1, and it also incurs a substantial performance
penalty. I have done a lot of research on McAfee, and Norton may have
similar settings, but not having used it, I can't say for sure.

McAfee is fairly configurable, but you need to know a little about what
it is doing. For example, there is on-demand and on-access scanning. The
difference is that while on-demand simply searches your files on disk
for infection, on-access scanning checks EVERY FILE when you use it
(like open it in an editor, etc) or save it. Now, to its credit, it
maintains a cache of recently scanned files so if you open the same file
again, and it hasn't changed, then it doesn't scan it again. This
scanning can impose a significant delay (my findings show up to 30%) in
accessing the file.

Depending on your usage scenario, it may not be necessary to have this
feature enabled, or to configure it to be more lenient than the default.
You can filter what it scans based upon file extension (you probably
want to scan .exe, .dll. .scr, etc. but not .txt, .bmp, or .mp3 for
example). You can also mark certain folders for exclusion (perhaps
folders where you store your text or video files).

If you have email scanning enabled, and you are very careful about what
you download from the internet, and do on-demand scans regularly, then
it may not be necessary to have on-access scanning at all. There is a
tradeoff between how secure you want your system to be vs. how much
performance penalty you are willing to endure.

Where most of these products fall short though is educating the customer
on these options and how best to set them, or walking them through
various scenarios.

Russ Poffenberger
[log in to unmask]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: PCSOFT - Personal Computer software discussion list
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Penlington
> Sent: Friday, October 15, 2004 4:57 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [PCSOFT] Norton 2005 Products
>
>
> Gordon  wrote:
> >Recently, I installed Norton's Internet Security 2005 and
> Norton System
> >Works 2005.  I've used Norton's stuff for 20 years and been very
> >pleased.  However, after this new installation it seems my
> computer has
> >slowed down too much >>
>
>
> What have you installed it on?  Unless your system has
> resources to spare, that's what I'd expect.
>
> Closing some of your background applications might help a bit.
>

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