The extreme amount of ignorance in this thread is not surprising. Norton was being praised everywhere for lightweight since two years ago.
Compared to what a bulldozer dragging the moon through the ocean against the tide?
Considering I personally test a few AVs every year and currently have a copy of Norton 2010 sitting right next to me I can personally confirm that it's FAR from "lightweight"
Windows startup and shut down times are extended, software opening is extended, sure maybe it does a decent job at shutting itself down into "game mode" but it still plays a huge role in making computers all around simply slouchy.
You know a few years ago there was a plethora of people claiming CA A/V was the best thing since physics. Unfortunately it's pretty widely known among techs to be probably the single worst major commercially available A/V solution.
Want to call me ignorant, I tested it after being told they would give me the copy for free.
It was tested up against Kaspersky, CA, McAfee, NOD32, Vipre, AVG, TrendMicro, MSE, and Normon.
I tested it on numerous machines to get a general idea, ranging from P4 2.8ghz 1gb of ram Win XP, to an i3 540 4gb ram Win 7 x64, in all instances I found Norton to have the largest impact on performance among that grouping and by a fair amount may I add.
I have been and continue to remove Norton from customers computers complaining that they are performing poorly and replace it with Vipre or MSE and the problems are solved the customers are happy and that is the only change.
Sorry but you can't really refute thousands of customers on thousands of computers, first hand experience from a knowledgeable and trained person doing the work. Again as follows, these systems range from P4 2.4's with 256mb of ram to i7's with 24gb of ram, never once have I had a customer say the change was not extremely well worth it and they will NEVER go back to Norton again.
There is a reason some ISP's give it away for free, that's all it's worth, simply put nothing in the world is free and generally something that is free isn't worth the hassle.
That's my 2cents.
Next year when I do the tests again, when Norton I'm sure is said to be oooo so light weight and easy on resources... I'll post up a good and complete review with graphs showing frame rates, load times, encoding etc.
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