43
With Norton 360, the trouble began
Q. When I renewed my Norton virus protection last spring, I opted for the Norton 360. Immediately, I began having problems with slowdowns, and I was unable to run two programs simultaneously. I added 1 gigabyte of memory, to no avail. A friend has the identical problem. Is this universal with Norton 360? Is there a solution?
A. Today’s security software packages are loaded with so many modules — from pop-up blockers to virus protection — that they have become real resource hogs on computers, experts say.
“You almost need server-grade hardware to accommodate these packages now, and even then, resources are still used quite a bit, said Jamie Marsigli, senior technical consultant with CMIT Solutions of North Raleigh, N.C.
He suggests using only the parts of Norton 360 or any other security software that you actually need. For instance, though you need to scan incoming e-mail for viruses, you don’t need to scan outgoing mail “since we all hope that you are not the one sending viruses as attachments,” he said.
Joe Vohwinkel, president of Agave Partners Consulting in Raleigh, N.C., had the same problem with Norton 360 last year. When he turned off Norton’s “Intrusion Detection” subsystem, which was taking up resources to monitor every modification he made to his system, his performance improved significantly.
If you already have a firewall and software to protect you from spam, viruses and spyware, you might consider turning off this feature, Vohwinkel said.
If you’re worried that someone who uses the computer could allow malicious code into the system while Web browsing, Vohwinkel suggests keeping your browser software updated and turning on the anti-phishing support feature.
Finally, Marsigli suggests that the problem could be that the installation package for Norton was corrupt. If that’s the case, “simply uninstalling the application, rebooting your PC and reinstalling could make a world of difference,” he said.
Q. There has to be an easier way to delete all items from my Outlook Express EZ Anti-Spam file than my method of pointing and clicking “delete” on each item. Surely I can empty the whole file somehow?
A. First, you might try right-clicking on the spam file on the navigation pane within Outlook Express (the one with all the folders). You may find an option there to delete all spam in the folder in one fell swoop.
Otherwise, there are a couple of keyboard tricks you can use to select multiple e-mail messages, photos or documents at once.
To select all of the e-mail messages in your spam file, click on the message at the top, then hold down “shift” and click the message at the bottom of the page. That should highlight everything. Then click the “delete” button to get rid of them all. “Control-A,” which allows you to select all, will do the same thing.
If you were going through your inbox and only wanted to delete certain messages, you could hold down “control” and then click only the e-mail you want to delete. When you have highlighted all of them, click on the “delete” button to get rid of them.
X Think you can stump the geeks? Send your high-tech question to stumpthegeeksnewsobserver.com. Please include your name, address and daytime phone number. Individual replies are not given.
2008 The News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.).