Symantec slam

Via ongoing, Tim Bray makes mention of a joke regarding multicore computers: "If it's Windows, one of the cores could be running Norton AntiVirus." Then he found out that PC Magazine reviewed a new multicore computer and actually suggested such a thing.

The real problem here is not antivirus programs. (There are actually good ones.) The problem is that Symantec has just run their Norton product line into the ground. I tried running NAV on both our laptop and desktop here at home, and both machines took a significant performance hit. Looking at Task Manager, it's not hard to see why: there's a host of NAV-related services running in the background. If you turn on the I/O Reads and Writes columns in the Processes tab, it's not uncommon to see the main NAV program has read about 1-2M times from the hard drive just at startup. (This probably means an extra core devoted to NAV wouldn't help anyway -- it's I/O bound, not CPU-bound.)

It really is funny how long Symantec has been able to maintain their dominance with Norton. I guess everyone assumes their computer just has to be slow now, in the name of security.