I am using Norton antivirus on some older computers. Norton is using the hard drive 90% of the time. I paid Norton to speed up my computer and now Norton used 95% of the hard drive time. It takes hours for Norton to finish every day and will most likely start over. I pay for 6 accounts and all the machines are Dogs. I know, get new computers, with SS drive.

Right now I am using 2% CPU time , 40% of the memory, 0% of the Network, 0% GPU and With Norton working 100% Disk time and after Norton is done with its job 0% to 1% of the Disk time. Should it take 3 hours to scan 1gb that is 50% full?

What do you use?

 

On Win 10 and 11, I use Windows Defender.


https://www.pcmag.com/reviews/microsoft-windows-defender-security-center

I think I recall having to change something manually to enable ransomware protection.

 

What is anti virous ?

 

What is anti virous ?

Thanks for the help. Bad fingering.

 

Malware bytes is what I use.

 

I use ESET more than 10 years. Now on 7 computers.
I forgot about viruses at all.
https://www.eset.com/us/

 

Oh ! That thing from 20+ years ago. Got it. I do not use any since 2005, and I like it the best.

 

At present, none.

 

Mac user here. I've never used any anti-virus software in 4 decades.

 

I don't.

 

I don't run any antivirus (although I've disabled Defender, I wouldn't be surprised if some update has reenabled it). As a result, I am paranoid about sites I visit and things I download. I got infected with some malware one time, and that was because I let myself get tricked into clicking on a link on a friend's site that I had gone to specifically to download 7Zip and the first thing I saw was a button to download 7Zip. I assumed it was a button he had put there, but his site was ad-supported and it turned out to be a click-bait ad that caused all kinds of problems and that took me several hours to get rid of. I wasn't paranoid enough that day.

I generally try to run a malware scanner every year (usually around Christmas time -- i.e., end of year), but I am behind a couple years at this point. I check with some friends that stay up on these things each time to see which ones they recommend, as ones that were good and reliable last year might have gone over to the dark side and be more interested in spamming you this year. I've never had a scan pop positive for anything. When I had a tool installed and running in the background, it was AVG and I was pretty happy with it until they made some change in their business model that annoyed me (don't recall the details). For several years, I used Panda as my yearly-scan tool, but, again, I don't recall the specifics on why I went away from them.

My dad, on the other hand, was a prime example of someone that should never turn on a machine without antivirus running, as he would go searching the web for interesting programs and games and download whatever caught his eye. He ran Norton for several years, but it slowed his machine to such a crawl that it was practically worthless. I removed it and installed a different one (don't remember, that was over twenty years ago shortly before he passed away) that greatly improved his performance.

I don't pay for these tools, which causes a bit of a problem because you have to be extra careful with free tools -- why are they free? Are they free because they are trying to introduce you to their other products and services? Okay, fine. If they want to show me ads while their tool is doing it's scan, I'll accept that as the price of admission. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that offer free scanners that do a one-time scan, and do it legitimately and let you address issues found for free, but what they are in the business of is selling on-going live scanning services, which I don't want. So their marketing model fits well with what I am looking for. But if it's free because the tool is really malware itself in disguise, that's a very different situation. Whatever tool you decide to use, spend some time researching them, as there are a lot of tools out there that are malware masquerading as anti-malware tools.

 

So I decided to go ahead and look into doing a scan, since its long overdue. I read several reviews and TotalAV seemed to get good marks, although it appears to be pretty aggressive about pushing you to buy their premium service. That's fine, as long as it doesn't continue doing so after I've completed the scan. It appears that the "free" tool has quite a bit of functionality -- for three days. After that, the utility is limited to just the scanner, which is fine for my use.

Here's a report on my experience with it so that you can decide if you want to give it a go.

It did it's "Smart Scan" and found no malware or PUAs (potentially unwanted applications). It found three tracking cookies and twelve browser cookies. There are 12 autorun programs, so I do want to look at each of those, but I suspect they are all legit and that I might want to remove a couple of them. It found 10 duplicate files (surprised it's only that many, given how I create and organize course content) and a couple thousand junk files (which may or may not be actual junk) claiming 44 GB of recoverable space. At this point, there's a pop-up with this information that seems to be implying that I have to pay for a subscription (at 70% off!) to "Get Protected". We'll see what I can do without that by just closing that pop-up.

That brought up a window that appears to let me deal with all of these.

The tracking cookies are all msn.com cookies in Edge. Unfortunately, I have no choice but to use Microsoft 365 and Outlook for my university stuff and since I also now have no choice but to use Outlook for my personal e-mail and the two accounts don't play nice together in the same browser, I use Chrome for personal stuff and Edge for school stuff. I don't know if those tracking cookies are needed as part of the "one login" features that the school uses for the various resources, so by deleting them, I may have to jump through some hoops to get access to everything again. But it's worth a try -- hopefully it will turn out that more normal cookies are used for that. But, if they come back, I'm not going to be too upset.

When I told it to clear the tracking cookies, it claimed to clear six of them (not the three it reported). It's possible that the other three were somehow related/subsidiary to the other three. After clearing them, it popped up another window and launched a browser tab to give the opportunity to upgrade. Annoying, but I can close a few tabs.

Next up are the junk files. It did a nice job of categorizing these and letting me pick and choose which categories to clean. For instance, there was 11+ GB in the Recycle Bin. That's low-hanging fruit. The big one was the Windows Error Reporting Files, at nearly 32 GB. These are probably useful for someone trying to investigate some of the annoying behavior I see from time to time, but I'm not the person that can do that. So since I have no plans to do any investigating now, I can delete these and when the behavior comes up again, it will hopefully generate new files that would be easier for someone to use. There's a half gigabyte of Windows logs. I could probably delete those, on the same grounds, but they are small enough that I won't bother. Everything else is small fry, like 3 MB of cached Windows Updates or 103 MB of temporary files (though it brings back to mind the days when a 20 MB hard drive was considered a large drive!). It deleted a bit over 1000 files and freed up 43+ GB -- and popped up another opportunity to activate the pro edition so that I can keep using this feature.

Next are the Autorun programs, which is something I am interested in cleaning up (and something I could do without this tool, but we'll see how this goes). It reported 20 such programs. It can be hard to tell whether some of them are needed/wanted or not. Anything from the computer manufacturer, I'm leaving enabled. Same for anything from the printer manufacturer that I'm using. There's a couple from an "Unidentified Publisher" named "Delete Cached Update Binary" and "Delete Cached Standalone Update Binary". I did a bit of checking and these appear to be scheduled by the OS on an as-needed basis. It would be nice if Microsoft identified themselves as the publisher. I also found one site that claimed they are related to OneDrive, which has been a persistent thorn in my site since the university is so in love with it. I'm going to disable those, even though I suspect they will come back. Next is KeePassXC, which is a password manager I tried and didn't like, so that's getting disabled. That it's been running in the background is not a concern because I never actually entered any passwords into it. OneDrive is getting disabled, but it will probably come back. I'm disabling the LGSmartAssistantExtension, even though it's from the computer manufacturer, on general principles. There's an OpenVPN-GUI that is related to a site I joined a few months ago that requires a VPN connection to their site (for valid reasons), but it gave me a bunch of trouble and I abandoned the site. This has resulted in an error getting reported every time I reboot the machine, so disabling this should solve that (this and KeePass are the two startup issues I've been meaning to deal with). Finally, there's PCmoverPopup, which I can't for the life of me see why it needs to be automatically started up. So that's seven startup programs disabled, three of which are likely to come back. And, of course, another popup letting me know that I only get to use this feature for another 48 hours, so I better activate my subscription now!

Next up is the panel for the web browsers. It shows 3 saved logins each for Chrome and Edge. I don't use the browser to save passwords, but I recognize each of the sites as essentially sites that I had a very peripheral connection to and needed to be able to come back to for a short amount of time and so I let the browser save the password out of convenience. That was a short-lived bit of insanity on my part, so I'm fine with deleting these and, if necessary, jumping through the forgot-password routine if I ever go to those sites again. I'm a bit puzzled by it reporting zero cookies for Chrome, since I know that I've got cookies in use, for instance for AAC so that I don't have to login each time. Perhaps this is referring only to third-party cookies, which I routinely disable. There's a lot of web history, cashed items, and download history. I don't like having that info around to be mined, but there's not a lot of point to getting worked up over it. I'll go ahead and delete all of this stuff, but it will just start building again.

Next are the duplicate files. These were all innocuous files that were inadvertently downloaded multiple times. This utility seems very near-sighted, as I have a lot of files that are duplicated in multiple places on my hard disk. Perhaps I'll write a Python script to catalog my drive and report duplicates in a way that is useful for what I do. So I let it deleted the duplicates and, gee, I got another chance to "Activate Now" -- they weren't kidding when they said that this program is a bit aggressive about pushing it's paid subscription. But, again, that's fine in this context. Just be careful not to accidentally hit the big green button instead of the little 'X' in the top-right corner (but, if you do, you will have plenty of notice that you've goofed before anything happens, since you have actually enter your payment info).

Overall, the results were about what I expected.

 

WOW !
I admire you dealing with so much complexity. I do not use Firefox, do not know what Chrome, Defender, Norton, Outlook or Edge are, do not use Google, do not use Windows.
I will stay with the peace using Brave on Ubuntu, for 19 years now.

---> Topic should be moved to 'Software' or 'Off topic' This is not electronics.