TechSpot - PC Technology News and Analysis

I need some advice on this guys: Right now I use Norton AV 2003 and Norton IS 2003. I sit up at night thinking about how much these programs absorb, thus bogging down my cpu. What should I try. Dont get me wrong Norton IS and AV have been great, they just use to much. What are some good alternatives? For both IS and AV? Thanks again guys.............

In no particular order:
Firewalls: Zone Alarm, Tiny, Kerio, McAfee, BlackIce, Sygate, Outpost
Antivirus: McAfee, Trend, Kaspersky, F-Secure, F-Prot, AVG
And probably some i forgot..

I am really not going to talk about which one of them are good or bad. I have tried all those firewalls, have only used one AV. Whether you find some of them good or bad is your personal preference.

The question that haunts me right now is.... What will be my next job?

How about the other readers?

i seem to wonder how much does bill gates know about me?

I use Norton AV and IS. Don't get me wrong... they are awesome programs... I've used them forever. If you're having resource problems, try unininstalling, then re-installing minimaly.

Me too, cause right now I don't have a job. I hope to get my MCSD .NET and MCDBA certs to help correct this situation, but I'm still several months away from taking the tests.

Now for the main topic ... I wouldn't have thought that running Norton AV and IS would consume much CPU overhead, and in most cases you shouldn't be aware of any slowdown. Sure you'll notice it taking longer to start programs and copy files, but the performance hit is pretty minimal, so don't worry about it. I use Norton AV and ZoneAlarm, and I don't notice much performance hit. It's better to be protected than have a slight increase in performance. Other products will be roughly similar in use of resources, so just stick with what you have.

The only time that NAV cuts into my resources is during the weekly system scan that it performs, I have tried to set it so that it doesn't bother me, but once in a while I'm still up doing something at 2:00am Monday morning. Other than that, It never puts any strain on my system. I don't know about NIS, as I only run APF, which is part of NIS, and NPF doesn't seem to bother me at all, unless I set it to alert me of attacks, in which case the only difference is the nagging little blinking icon in the tray.

I have tried several Firewalls before settling on NPF, and they all pretty much performed the same as far as protection(when tested using several online tests) Some didn't like certain other apps I run, and some just weren't set up in a way that I was comfortable with(GUI wise). AV software was pretty much the same story.

i use sygate's firewall as its got some kind of resistance to be overwriten by a bug, that is according to some mag i read about a year ago, i dont know what other programs have that ability now. the firewall uses about 5 percent of my cpu when im actually doing something like aim or downloading etc. never had a prob with norton av

well maybe its just me....but under processes....symantec has a ccPxySvc.exe that is using 69,564 kb.......thats quite a bit...........

69MB is a lot of memory being used. That figure should vary depending on what activity is happening at the time, and I would not expect it to be an average, otherwise something is wrong. Memory usage should increase during scanning/file activity, then be released when needed by other processes. If this isn't happening, then maybe you check for any updates to your products.