My life without Norton Antivirus

In this world of change we need to be ready to accept different ideas along the way. I'm not like that. When I think something is good, I stick to it stubbornly.

I've been an advocate for Norton Antivirus for years now. It worked better than the "other" antivirus, Mcafee VirusScan, and was less hassle to maintain. Starting from version 2004 and the introduction of simple firewall and worm protection it became a gamble to maintain. But that is not the main problem.

With version 2005 I started noticing a significant degradation in computer performance. Any computer. A fast reliable PC would drop down to half the performance right after installing NAV. A slow computer would crawl. This still didn't make me change my mind about NAV as the only possible choice, regarding the other option clutter and ambiguity. No articles about how NAV is a huge bulk or junk code that hogs computer resources would put me down because I didn't know of any better alternative.

Until one night, after upgrading t NAV 2007, I tried connection to the office VPN and the laptop just wouldn't. Because the only changed settings that would affect connection was NAV 2007, and because VPN connection worked when I turned off NAV, I looked up any problems regarding that and Window VPN connection. Not to my surprise, I found out that the only solution is to turn off Worm Protection if I need to connect to a VPN.

At this point I realised it's time for a drastic change in my life. To find a new antivirus. I Googled "cnet best antivirus" and the third result enlightened me. I found my new friend. NOD32 from ESET.

I installed NOD32 on my office PC (Windows XP Pro) to try it out and removed NAV at the same time. After a couple of restarts my system could perform to its full potential. The biggest improvement was virus scanning of Microsoft Outlook email traffic. With NAV I had to stop working every 10 minutes to let it do its Outlook traffic scan with every mail check.

My wife's laptop (Windows XP Pro) takes less than 25% of the time it used to take from typing Windows Login to being able to launch applications. With NAV we had to wait until the NAV client loads into memory (which took forever) to be able to do anything.

Home computer, which is a slow piece of junk (Celeron, Windows XP MCE 2005) showed the most improvement in overall performance. This NOD32 is so lightweight and invisible.

The application interface is odd. It's not easy to understand all the abbreviations and code names given to the different modules. But overall, it doesn't get in the way of any other legit application, it's quite transparent, and it let my computer breathe. So long NAV. My life is much better without you.