Does Norton Antivirus slow down computers?

[leandrohailey]

We own a small business and i am looking at getting Symantec Endpoint for small Buisnesses, which is a Norton product, but i am concerned it will slow down our computers.

[PCC-William]

In the past, Norton's antivirus programs were indeed notorious for slowing down computers. These days that is less of a concern, though: multi-core systems with lots of RAM are more resilient to slow-downs like that, and I have heard that as of their 2010 version Norton has been doing a better job with overall performance of their software.

With that said, though, I am *not* specifically familiar with "Endpoint". It looks like that is a combination of their antivirus with some other features... so I don't know if those other features will slow things down or not. If there is an option to test it out for a while on maybe a single system I would give that a try and see how it goes. There are also a lot of other options out there for AV software, depending on your specific needs.

[dao2]

Symantec is a fair bit more light weight then Norton which is still pretty chock full of useless crap. It's basically a cut down version that rid of all the useless stuff they put in the more personal-oriented. The important bit (auto protection/av scan) is all the same. I'm unsure if they throw out updates more often but Symantec updates almost every day. You can go for stand alone clients or managed clients with a symantec server. It has other (separate) stuff like symantec mail security but it's really a separate product. Also it's actually the other way around, Norton is a Symantec Corporation product.

The auto protect is not really taxing on a system but while rtvscan is running it'll tax it, but have them set to scan at off-hours and your golden. It's easy to manage and catches a fair bit of stuff, Symantec + Prevx is a nice combo.

[hughsergie78]

There are some antivirus that might slow your cumputer such as McAffe, which blocks pretty much everything on your computer. I used norton for 6 months because it came with my Laptop when I bought it with an free antivirus license. But It expired 6 months, during this time my computer worked well. SO I don't think it's going to slow your PC. Just try to have compatible software.-

[Alexjones284]

Yes Norton 360 could be slow for pentium 4 users but it works absolutely fine with i3 and i7 processors. No slow down issues.

[Jeenirockss]

Some time computer perform slow because of update of new version.

[J-Mac]

After abandoning all Norton products back around 2002 or 2003 - I was running Norton AntiVirus and Norton Systemworks - I just stayed away from anything and everything Norton for years. Then last year, after two years of reading how Norton had revamped their programs and they were running smoothly, I purchased a 3-PC license for Norton AntiVirus 2012. I was very pleasantly surprised!

A very fast and light installation - surprisingly with no mandatory restart required - and it has been running all year very quietly and smoothly. Of course there are some settings and exclusions I needed to make to get it where I wanted it, but all in all I am satisfied. I had used Eset for the previous four years and I was getting very weary of their penchant for false positives. Plus I had six separate licenses that all expired at different times and Eset will not combine them for easier subscription updating.

I just purchased and installed the latest version; Amazon is calling it Norton AntiVirus 2013 but apparently Norton has removed all "year" references from the names of their software. Go figure.

BTW, I strongly recommend that you do NOT ever renew your license directly with Norton/Symantec! Pricing for renewals is prohibitive. E.g., When my subscription expiration date was nearing, I checked the renewal price and Symantec wanted me to renew the licenses and upgrade to NAV 2013 at $44.99 per PC for 1 year each! That would be $134.97. I could not find any price for a "1 User, 3 PC" license like I had purchased before at Amazon.com. So instead I just purchased it new from Amazon - NAV 2013, 1 user, 3 PCs for $17.99 total! Downloadable too. I was told on their forum that if I contacted Symantec Support they would offer a discount, but how the heck much could they discount it? Surely not enough to match $17.99.

Thanks!

Jim

[PCC-William]

Good info, Jim! I'd heard that Norton had gotten better in recent years - starting around 2010 or so - but hadn't seen much in the way of hands-on accounts like that. Also, nice tips about the licensing

[Jenfrag]

it hogs up everything from the internet to the ram to your whole system aslo gives you false hits saying something is a virus when its not funny thing is when you delete it and run another virus scan it seems to find 2 or more right away norton seem to depend to much on all show and no go friendly yes beautiful looking and easy but its eats ram like uncle harry at christmas time .
Lose it and get a very ram and computer friendly antivirus like AVG or Avast

[J-Mac]

Hasn’t happened here, on any of the computers running NAV.

Jim