SubscribeNorton Antivirus 2009 (finally) delivers
I first began using Norton products in the early 90s, with Norton Advanced Utilities version 4.5, and I was a huge fan of their products for a number of years. For well over a decade, though, Symantec’s Norton line of products has been extremely bloated and every one of them that I have run has added a very noticable system lag. I’ve always found it a little ironic since many of their products are supposed to enhance or monitor system performance. For many years, running Norton System Monitor was analagous to adding a 500 pound fuel guage, a 1000 pound spedometer, and a 1500 pound odometer to your car. The last version of NAV that I ran, which was either 2004 or 2005, was about the same. After installing NAV, even doing something as simple as opening notepad was executed with a bit of hesitation and a lot of grinding. (Note: I’ve never had problems with Symantec’s corporate line of products, such as SAV.)
With that said, now that I have a newer notebook, I had to find an Antivirus program which would run on Vista x64. Over the years, Norton, despite its bloated footprint, has consistently scored at or near the top in all of the virus scanner reviews that I’ve read. Since they offer a version which will run on x64, I decided to give it a shot. I’m extremely pleased with my system performance since installing it – which is to say that I don’t notice that it’s there. Without being able to quantify it, I can simply state that there is no noticable difference in overall system performance with NAV 2009 installed or without it.
Since the license allows me to install it on up to three home computers, I installed it on my older XP Pro (32) system, and I’m happy to report that the results are about the same: NAV 2009 is installed but there is no noticable lag.
This is exactly how system utilities such as antivirus software should work. Since the work that we all do is predominantly productive work (right?), then we shouldn’t know any utilities are there until we need them.
Disclaimers:
- Yes, I’m aware that there are free versions of Avast and AVG. I’ve used them before on some systems and I’m likely to use them again in the future.
- Yes, I’m aware that as of this post, MacOS and Linux are less susceptible to viruses. I also can’t run any of my applications on them so it’s a moot point.