I want to ask you pros about a performance issue. Ever since I decided to get norton antivirus, my system has been alot slower. I had to format a while back, since it was a while since I had done that. I decided to install norton antivirus 2004 after I had formatted. I immediately noticed a significant slowdown on my system, everything was and is moving slower. I know that it is a heavy program, and that the auto protect runs in the background all the time, checking everything I download, making my system hang for several seconds at a time. I know I can disable it, but the whats the point? Do I really have to have a slow system to be protected against viruses? Or is there some tweaks I can do to make it faster? I have just tweaked XP a little, and It is now running better, but norton is still slowing it down alot. I am thinking about getting more ram, an additional 512MB. Do you think that could improve things?
It is tolerable, but I use heavy adobe programs, and lots of stuff all at once, so I would really like of there were anything I could do to speed things up.

Thanks in advance for any answers you might have :mrgreen:

This is my system:
Athlon 1.8Ghz
512MB ram
XP pro SP2

The additional RAM should surely help; I have Norton also, but have recently found recommendations for System Mechanic (www.iolo.com), which I am planning on trying. But it doesn't have an antivirus program with it. I believe there are good, free AV programs available (TrendMicro?).

Hope this helps a bit; you'll probably get more recommendations shortly.

Any other Norton products running as well? They are notorious for being the most system hungry products of their type, and I definitely do not recommend their use.

Sure you installed all drivers when you formatted and reinstalled Windows. If your system is trying to operate using generic Windows drivers for the motherboard and other components, that could cause slow operation as well.

Here's a thread with more info on Norton and System Mechanic:
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread11309.html

Thanks for the replies. I will order more RAM shortly, so hopefully that will help abit. I have no other Norton programs running. Perhaps I will try some other programs. Again, thanks for the replies