Widescreen Gaming Forum

I say desktop, with a cheap Centrino laptop for when you are 'away'. And why Norton?

I have had good experiances with them (Norton) if some website auto downloads a virus it knows and deletes it after telling you it has kept my computers safe and I am used to the interface

Personally I was tired of my games taking ages to load, searchs also taking a lot of time to finish (always used Norton), last year I've tried the NOD32 and I've already renewed for a second year using. It is an amazing piece of software, highly optimized, fast and very accurate, did not let any virus in in this 1 year and a half. Also, it takes little space in RAM compared to Norton. If you can, just try it, if I'm not mistaken you can trial it for a month.

I have had good experiances with them (Norton) if some website auto downloads a virus it knows and deletes it after telling you it has kept my computers safe and I am used to the interface

Fair enough. I just find Norton such a system hog, though. On the default settings, it scans each and every file each time it's accessed, which cripples game performance and also causes Windows to behave quite slowly at times. Also, three minute bootups are unacceptable for me - and that is a best case scenario with Norton.

Then there is the scanner itself. It is slow. 100,000 files in Norton takes well over an hour. The same number of files with AVG takes 22 minutes. Less than a third of the time. And that is with 'scan within archives' 'scan all files' and heuristics enabled.

I've heard that the Corporate Edition (without all the bull front end prettiness) is faster and less system intensive. But I've never managed to get hold of a copy, as the universities I've worked at have all bought the 'consumer' version...

I used the Norton Internet Security for years, but after some advice here at WSGF, I tried Avast!. Its free for personal usage and low on resource usage. Tried it also on my fathers laptop and it actually found viruses that Norton didn't catch... Avast! also have real time scanning as Norton and gives same (or better) protection against anything incoming. The only thing that NIS does, is also to protect against outgoing better.