Hidden things that make your computer slower

[The PIT]

I was getting a bit narked by the slowness at times when refreshing under My Computer or just opening it up.
I decided to check Norton antivirus and the settings under auto protect although it was disabled. Sure enougth scan floppies and all removeable media was still ticked. Re-enabled Auto protect disabled the ghosted out floppy check etc and then disabled auto protect again.
Reboot and so far instant refresh.

[Kooldino]

Damn Norton lag.

[az]

Norton... artificially producing the need for their products by making windows seem slow and unstable when it's in reality their stuff...

AZ

[The PIT]

Yeh it's time Microsoft built decent registry scanners and defragger sinto there op systems. Second thoughts perhaps not.

[High_Jumbllama]

Originally posted by az
Norton... artificially producing the need for their products by making windows seem slow and unstable when it's in reality their stuff...

AZ

Well if people would actually pay attention to the programs and check the settings especially for something as intense as a virus scanner then they would know what they are in for.

• Autoprotect: Comprehensive/Smartscan - Bloodhound - Scan floppies on boot and shutdown.
• Script Blocking
• Email
• Instant Messengers: AOL, MSN, Yahoo
• Office Plugin

All of these can be found out and turned off if the user looks through the manual or the options section. How is this Norton's fault? Should they be like Microsoft and ship products with the security settings turned off?

[az]

Jumbllama, I must admit I don't use Norton stuff anymore, so I'm only talking out of experience with their old Win95 stuff. My computer was MUCH slower and crashed MUCH more often with Norton utilities installed, and when they introduced CrashGuard I only heard from people that CrashGuard was crashing constantly. Thus I stopped using Norton stuff, especially as it wouldn't uninstall properly.

BTW, Norton's Virus scanner doesn't rate very high.

AZ

[RedRed]

I must admit, I found CrashGuard to be the biggest peice of old-dogs-farts!

It crashed constantly, hogged the processor and was an all round bad egg...

Disk Doctor, salvage and the various batch enhancers were good, in the old days of DOS

I dont know what they are like these days...

RedRed

[The PIT]

Originally posted by High_Jumbllama
Well if people would actually pay attention to the programs and check the settings especially for something as intense as a virus scanner then they would know what they are in for.

• Autoprotect: Comprehensive/Smartscan - Bloodhound - Scan floppies on boot and shutdown.
• Script Blocking
• Email
• Instant Messengers: AOL, MSN, Yahoo
• Office Plugin

All of these can be found out and turned off if the user looks through the manual or the options section. How is this Norton's fault? Should they be like Microsoft and ship products with the security settings turned off?

If you read my post I've turned off auto protect. Now you would think that this would disable virus checking on floppies cdroms etc since it's part of the submenus under autoprotect. If disabling auto protect doesn't disable floppy checking etc they should be placed on a separete menu. Basically it's a bad interface design.

[The PIT]

Originally posted by RedRed
I must admit, I found CrashGuard to be the biggest peice of old-dogs-farts!

It crashed constantly, hogged the processor and was an all round bad egg...

Disk Doctor, salvage and the various batch enhancers were good, in the old days of DOS

I dont know what they are like these days...

RedRed

Crashgaurd == Trash guard.

Diskdoctor still okay but the regcleaner needs beefing up somewhat.

[Maggi]

Originally posted by cking4@ford.com
A process for Norton's Protected Recycle Bin also continues to run even if you don't have it enabled, at least on
my system (W2K).
...

to get rid of that one, you'd need to stop the running service and set it to be started "manually"
(right-click MyComputer > Administration > Services and Applications > Services ... or whatever it's named on an english OS)

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Maggi
to get rid of that one, you'd need to stop the running service and set it to be started "manually"
(right-click MyComputer > Administration > Services and Applications > Services ... or whatever it's named on an english OS)

funny I set virus check service to disabled. Still scanned the cd's though. Damned Nortons.

[Gurm]

No. Disk Doctor is no longer "ok". It finds errors but can't fix them, at least under Win2k/WinXP. It "schedules" a fix on reboot, but the "fix" is just CHKDSK, which can't find the problems in the first place because it's crap.

I am now using Ontrack's EZ Recovery Pro. MUCH MUCH MUCH better. There is no longer any Norton software on my machine, and I'm happier for it.

- Gurm

[The PIT]

Originally posted by Gurm
No. Disk Doctor is no longer "ok". It finds errors but can't fix them, at least under Win2k/WinXP. It "schedules" a fix on reboot, but the "fix" is just CHKDSK, which can't find the problems in the first place because it's crap.

I am now using Ontrack's EZ Recovery Pro. MUCH MUCH MUCH better. There is no longer any Norton software on my machine, and I'm happier for it.

- Gurm

Yeh I forgotten about chkdsk thingy. Also sometimes it gets confused and doesn't run anything.

Add Nortons Disk Doctor to the list that wants beefing up.

[Fat Tone]

Crash Guard had its place. I used to run automated processes overnight. It was old 16-bit code running on Win95b (no choice at the time). Without Crash Guard you could guarantee it would crash just after you left the office; With it, crashes were much much rarer.

T.