anti virus

[bignanny]

Hi
I have just bought a new computer with Norton 360 free for 1 year and I have downloaded Virgin's free anti virus which tells me to uninstall Norton. Which is best? Does anyone know?

Thank you

[badlad.biz]

Norton 360 is definatly going to be the best by far, however, If your pc is of low to medium spec it could well slow down your pc to a crawl, whereas the Virgin one will not.

[redbreast]

Read your answer for same Question Please explain Computer specs for a layman

[TonyBeeeee]

A very crude check of how hard your pc is working at any given time can be made as follows.

Firstly, switch off any programs you are running (playing cd's, internet etc). You are now just running the basic machine itself, with all the stuff thats running in the background.

Pres Ctrl Alt and Delete at the same time: this opens Windows Task Manager. You can minimise it by clicking the left-most box of the 3 at the to right hand side, the _ symbol.

Look down at the task bar at the bottom of the screen, and you will see a small square with a dark green top and a light green bottom. The light green part will go up and down as the processor etc. kicks into life. If it spends most of its time showing light green towards the top of the box when you are doing nothing (but with Norton and other things running in the background) then your pc is working hard most of the time. If so switch Norton off temporarily and see how much difference it makes.

It may spend a lot of time showing light green even with Norton turned off, in which case you either have a lot of stuff running all the time or you may actually have a virus thats slowing things down.... in which case it's time to run Norton and do a full scan anyway!

Give it a try, its simple to do and you can make a basic assessment at any time.

This will also be useful in trying to decide if your pc spec is a little too low for your normal useage. Even seemingly ordinary stuff like processing digital photos can take up resources because pics from large megapixel cameras can be pretty big these days, depending on the reolution set in the camera. MS Word can at times slow a decent pc down, its not a particulalrly good application imho. More exotic stuff like video processing or online gaming will certainly indicate you need more RAM if its light green most of the time.