Norton Antivirus Auto-Protect question...

[Comage]

Hi guys, I was wondering what auto-protect is actually doing when it's enabled in the background. Does it scan all files that you are accessing? If yes, does that include game files that are loaded/unloaded from/to memory when playing games?

If it's the same for games, wouldn't that slow down games considerably?

[rangeral]

Yes its scanning or waiting for something to come thru depending on what your doing figure its more active if your checking mail, if you've already scanned your system and playing a game offline no need to have it running, online games you can get by with just a firewall once you've allowed the game.

So disabling while playing will give you more resources while offline.

[Comage]

By disabling it, do you mean not even running the program at all, or run the program and then tell it to disable the autoprotect?

If it's the latter, wouldn't the program be still in memory (as seen in Task Manager under "Processes"? It's just like the program is paused only, and it's still using RAM (but not CPU resources), is it not?

[rangeral]

Depends, start with disabling the autoprotect if your still not satisfied terminate or end process on it, for gaming I would definitely kill the whole program.

[Tweb]

I disable NAV but keep the Email enabled, NAV slows down a computer an is not needed when just working on ur computer but MAY be needed when surfing the net, so u can disable it when just working on ur computer an enable it when u surf the net.

When ever I DL something I ALWAYS do a manual virus scan on it, it doesn't hurt to be safe....

[zybch]

NAV is a fantastic program if you want to take a 10-20% performance hit :)
You might want to run a benchmark program with autoprotect turned on and then off.
Then download one of the free scanners like AVG LINK (http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_dwnl_free.php) and see when the benchmark does with that installed rather than NAV.

You'll get a much better score when not using NAV.

Norton used to make really good utilities, now all they seem capable of is bloatware that chokes even the fastest of PCs.

I use GetRight for downloading. One of its options is to send the downloaded file through your scanner (you can tell it which one) when the download is finished. Nice.