I have been recently informed me that norton is a big system hog that could be causing my poor graphics perfromance and that lately it has been performing badly in detecting viruses. Anyone know where these performance tests are so i can read them to see how others are performing as well as norton? If I uninstall the antivirus part but keep the system tests it has will i get performance back or is it a "all or nothing" kind of thing?

I would really advise you to search the forums for opinions on Norton - many very knowledgeable IT people here (including IT professionals) have given their very negative though educated opinions on it.

If you don't want to though, sufficed to say that what you've heared is true. I would suggest that you get rid of Norton completley and install Kaspersy AV and Agnitum Outpost Pro firewall if you want to pay, or install ZoneAlarm (free) or Kerio firewall (free) and AVG (free).

Can i keep using the system stuff from it like the pcrepair and what not and remove the antivirus part to increase performance or "all or nothing" kind of thing?

I'm not sure, but I suspect it's an all or nothing thing. sorry. Somebody who'll be able to be more specific might answer this issue if I'm wrong.

Just disable/uninstall all the resident utilities like the antivirus and the undelete stuff (those really are crap).

The more sensible way would be uninstalling everything Norton (good luck with that ) and then putting back only the bare essential (good) utilities like Speed Disk, Ghost, etc. Install as few components as possible and disable any BS that Norton wants to run at system startup.