At what point does the cure become worse than the disease?
Over the years it has become common for me to kill as many tasks as possible on my PC in order to give the latest and greated video game all the resources it needs. This has often made me wonder “why is all this crap running?”
Enter into the picture Norton Antivirus/System works. One of my favorite and most trusted friends over the years since my 486sx 25mhz packard bell computer first succumbed to the Stoned.empire virus back in 96′. Back before the internet was a household necessity, these 3 floppies gave me the power I needed to keep my computer running. Win Doctor, Disk Doctor, Degrag, AntiVirus, it was the whole kit and kaboodle in one.
Over the years though, Norton has seemed to let itself go. No longer the slim, quick program I fell in love with, now it’s gotten larger, slower and spead itself all over my computer.
Today my Antivirus subscription expired, another underhanded tool used by companies to force rotating upgrades and guarentee revenue, so I did what most people wouldn’t consider. I uninstalled it.
Here are screen caps of my before stats on my system:
And after installing Norton Systemworks, Live Update, and Norton WMI. The last two I had to do manually as they were still in the add/remove program section of the control panel. Just another example of virulent programming. Below are screen caps of my system after a reboot and before running any programs:
The end result was my page file dropped from 231mb to 159mb and the number of running processes dropped an amazing 10 from 33 to 23.
That means that 10 processes on my computer were simply there just for Norton Antivirus. Nearly 1/3 of my comptur was being dedicated to simply stopping virus’s before I had even had the time to launch Internet Explorer….why I must be using the safest computer in the world!!!
As computers become faster and more disposable, I’m forced to draw the conclusion that it is not in the industries best interest to make better code. Just keep making it larger and more invasive so they can’t change and so they keep upgrading.
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