hello,
Norton is better then other antivirus.
That is an opinion and subject to debate...
Press ctrl, alt, delete and select task manager.
Click on the processes tab.
Scroll down the list and look for Norton Antivirus components that are running.
They will usually be listed as sym*********, Nav********
Watch the CPU & Mem Usage numbers...
No doubt it's a resource hog.
That' only part of the picture.
When it is running it uses other windows components such as AppSvc32.exe,
explorer.exe, Services.exe, rundll.exe, & taskmgr.exe this makes it difficult to see the full extent of its sucking down the resources of your PC.
Perhaps the easiest way is to look on tha list at system idle process and look at the CPU number. this shows how much the processor is being used. With nothing running the number should be at or very close to 100. This is saying that the system is idle and not doing anything.
Now start a Norton scan...
Watch the CPU number for system idle plummet.
That shows how much of the processor capacity is available for use by other processes. Not much left huh?
Thats only part of the picture. Click on the Task Manager Performance tab and look at the line on the Page File History Graph and watch that shoot up. That is an indicator of how much of your RAM is being used. If that meets the top it is an indicator that it has used up all the available RAM and instead of quickly writing to RAM it reverts to the slowwer process of writing to disc. Thats bad news and a sign that you need more RAM to be able to run it.
This is why your Pentium IV processor turns into a Commodore 64 when Norton is running.
Other anti-virus programs such as GrisoftAVG, & Kaspersky are sleeker more streamlined programs that use nowhere near the system resources that Norton does and offer full protection.
Just my opinion!