After installing SystemWorks 2003...

[GimpyFuzznut]

I just got my new computer today. It is blazing fast - boots up Windows XP in a few seconds, every loads quickly etc. However after installing Norton Systemworks Pro, the computer has seem to slown down. Booting up takes longer and simple things seem to take longer as well. Performance in games etc does not seem to have changed much but... for example, open the start menu and it sort of stalls, browsing folders in my computer seem to take a second longer, opening webpages seem to take longer. Am I just imagining this or does Systemworks really slow down performance? Antivirus and some other Norton programs are running in the background. If Systemworks is causing this system slow down, what can I do to fix it?

 

[Lord Evermore]

SystemWorks (or rather each of the components) is terribly bloated these days. Norton Antivirus used to be small and fast, now it's been "XPified" and simply is slow. My suggestion is to uninstall ALL of it, and install just NAV (it's a file with a .msi extension in the NAV folder on the CD, which uses the Microsoft Installer rather than having the executable integrated in the file).

There's really nothing of value in Norton Systemworks anymore. SpeedDisk and Disk Doctor both use the built-in APIs for WindowsXP to do disk defragmenting and scanning, so there's no difference between using those or the standard XP apps to do it. Protected Recycle Bin is just annoying. Most of the other tools in Norton Utilities are either things not many people really need that just sit in the background hogging memory, or they're freely available from other sources. CleanSweep is pretty useless really unless you're installing and uninstalling things daily. "Crash protection" apps have always done more to slow down a system and CAUSE crashes than they've ever prevented. Things like the "web cleanup" and "connection keep alive" have been available in freeware for years. GoBack can be installed separately and may be part of your slowdown; I'm not sure how much active monitoring it does.

At the very least, you should be able to stop some of the tools from being loaded on startup, even if they're installed. Right click the icon(s) in the system tray and either exit them or go to their properties and see if there's an option to not load on startup. If nothing else, you can use msconfig to stop them being loaded manually. Norton Antivirus is the only thing that needs to be running in the background (Protected Recycle Bin doesn't have an icon in the system tray).

 

[GimpyFuzznut]

I think I will uninstall it all and just run Norton Antivirus. The rest of the utilities don't seem to have much use running in the background 24/7 and if I do need em, I always have the option of run them of the CD quickly. I just hope uninstalling them will leave a whole load of crap left on my system (empty folders, dead registry entries).

On that note, can anyone recommend a good application for cleaning up the registry and such?

 

[gwlam12]

could the reason for the slowdown be because nav scans every file that u open? have u tried turning off that feature?