Norton AntiVirus

I’d never used anti-virus software on my personal computer until I bought this notebook two years ago. I’d never had trouble with worms, viruses, trojans, or other malware, but people I trust and respect convinced me that I was just lucky–that things could get through my Linksys firewall, Windows firewall, and infect my machine. So I picked up a copy of Norton Antivirus at Fry’s and installed it.

I was planning to renew online this year, but I was at Fry’s the other day and noticed something interesting: Norton AntiVirus, 3-user license, on sale for $49.99. And there’s a $50.00 mail-in rebate! So if I buy that and mail in the rebate form, I end up getting the software for about $4.25 (the sales tax). Such a deal!

Symantec did a very good job with the install program, except for one thing. It does a preliminary system scan and then needs to reboot. Here’s the notification:

Who edits this stuff? First it was Apple’s idiotic insistence that users shouldn’t have to answer “Yes” or “No.” That gave us prompts with questions and two buttons: “OK” and “Cancel.” Now we have the opposite problem: “Yes” and “No” options with no question. It is to cry.

I installed Norton on Monday night. Last night I was doing some writing on the machine and it was terribly slow. I opened Task Manager and found that a program, appsvc32.exe, was consistently chewing up from 60 to 100 percent of the processor time. A quick search online reveals that appsvc32.exe is part of Norton AntiVirus, and that this is a known problem. The following seems to solve the problem while Symantec figures out how to fix it properly:

1. Bring up the Norton Protection Center.
2. Click on the Norton AntiVirus tab.
3. Click on the Settings bar to expand the settings menu.
4. Click on Auto-Protect, and then the Configure button that pops up.
5. On the left side of the dialog box that pops up, click on the General Settings link.
6. Clear the “Scan active programs and start-up files” checkbox, as shown here.