The Mystery of the Sllllooooooowwwww Computer

When our intrepid blonde heroine got her new computer (an HP Media Center with a gigbyte of Ram), she was thrilled with its speed and efficiency. Booting up, which had been a process requiring a stack of magazines and a couple of diet sodas to get through, was now mere seconds. Audio editing - her main use for the new computer - moved as quickly as she could. Life was good.

Over time, a certain slowness crept into the system's response. At first, she assumed this was natural as she had made modifications to her system, added software, added, removed, moved, and modified hundreds of media files. And it was negligible. Just a few seconds here or there.

But the system continued to slow down more and more over time to the point where our heroine could count to 30 before she could access a "Save" menu; almost as many to see results from an "Open" command. Boot up took longer. Why was she able to edit on her much-less-well-equipped laptop decidedly faster than on her media-ready desktop?

Like any good sleuth, she investigated all the usual suspects: she halted all unnecessary applications. She ran virus and spyware detection software. She optimized her system. She went into her start menu and removed all un-wanted software.

All of this resulted in not one nano-second of improvement.

In fact, to the contrary, something in this clean up evidently uninstalled or disabled Microsoft Sound Mapper, which rendered her microphone unusable - but that's for another adventure.

After running a system restore to get Microsoft Sound Mapper back, our heroine was flummoxed, which really, when you think about it, is an awkward state for a heroine to be in.

Looking through running processes in Windows Task Manager, she noted several entries that began with "cc" (such as ccSetMgr.exe, ccEvtMgr.exe), so she did a search on these executables and found they were related to Norton's Security 2006. Interesting. Norton's Security Center had come bundled with her system software, but she had never opted to continue it past its one month free coverage, and had instead found alternatives for her virus protection and firewall. But for some reason, these were still running. And not only running, but consuming far more resources than any other single running process on her system!

She performed an "Add/Remove Programs" and uninstalled the Norton entries.

No more trouble.

Word on the street had been that Norton, frequently the gold standard for good anti-virus software, had become bloated and cranky. Perhaps it didn't like not being activated for permanent use after the trial period? In any event, getting rid of it solved the performance problem.

But what remains a mystery is why if this program was never activated for permanent use it would continue to consume system resources at such a high level - presumably, it was not "protecting" our heroine's system in any way - that it actually effected system performance!

Well, the conclusion of our little mystery is: if you're going to use Norton for your virus and Internet Security, be prepared for a slow system. And if you're not going to use it, make sure you have something else in place. A slow system is always better than no system!

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