Norton 04 slowing my old PC :(

I unpacked my PC recently and ran it for a day without Norton 04 and it seemed to run quite a bit faster. Would this be right? My PC aint real fast anyway so I'm thinking of uninstalling Norton and installing something else. Was going to use ZoneAlarm but I see from another thread that this might slow my PC too?
Any suggestions as to what AV software might be best for me?

I'm running a Compaq with Pentium II - think it's 256 and 40Gb and ADSL connection.

ta muchly

 

Zonealarm is primarily a firewall. I don't think it will slow your computer down that much. I don't remember the different Norton versions, is 2004 where you have all in one, or is it stand alone AV and firewall?

I haven't used any other AV than Norton, but I'm sure others can give you advice on other good software. When I've installed it on slow machines I've disabled Autoupdate, as that slows it down a lot, and instead I've updated it manually. That has worked fine. But you have to remember to update it yourself. You could also disable autoprotect and just use the firewall unless when you are downloading or checking emails. A bit risky, but I've done that on some very old computers so they would run smoother.

I have Norton 2005 now, and it does a quick scan after each update, and that is a horrible slow down, so I've disabled that, and instead I make sure to run a complete scan more often. You could look in options and see if 2004 has the same. Sorry for not being more exact, I've only had Norton 2003 and 2005...

 

Yes I have found that Norton's past 2003, on 'old' hardware suffers major 'lag'. It is scanning everything, all the time. I dont know if 04 or 05 is the one that puts little pop-ups by the sys tray "waiting to scan bla.exe" then stacks another, and so on... but it made my 'old' PCs crawl.. so I had to go back to 2003 & so far have not suffered that much of a performance hit.
I have ran AVG on a 700MGHz very nicely, but Notron 2k3 ran just as good on that machine too.

 

Define "old" hardware... I round that on 2+ ghz machines, the Norton effect was significant.

Since XP SP2, we have been using, recommending and now selling (read: we became a reseller for) - NOD32 Anti-Virus - not least because we were impressed with the low system footprint compared to the Norton licenses we were replacing.

Download a free trial and see if it fits your system - I personally have it running on a 500Mhz PIII laptop which I keep lying around at home for mobile web surfing, and I have no problems with resource issues since switching FROM NAV.

regards

Greg Hewitt-Long

 

Uninstall Norton AV. I run ZA free and Avast on my dialup P2/400, 288mb Ram, W98SE laptop with absolutely no problems. System resources are no problem either, when all stuff is loaded that I need for protection on a net session. Suggestion, try a Memory Manager that will periodically free up your memory. That will also help. Bazza

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