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