Symantec Launches New Gamer-Friendly Antivirus

Posted By: Sarah Perez | Dec 10th, 2008 @ 10:42 AM

If there's anything gamers hate is having their PC interrupt them or slow them down when they're in the middle of a game. Now, gamers can keep their computer protected from the latest threats without having to worry about their AV getting in the way, says Symantec. The company's new Norton Antivirus 2009 Gaming Edition offers a "gamer mode" that promises not to bug you during gameplay or impact your system performance in any way.

According the company's web site, gamer mode offers the following: No alerts, no notifications, no interruptions, Optional settings to suspend updates, behavioral scanning and intrusion prevention, Gamer mode is automatically enabled when the PC is in full-screen mode. Gamer mode can be manually enabled with a click on the system tray icon. In addition, the Norton AV Gaming edition promises to be both fast and light.

Fast:
- Rapid Pulse Updates every 5 to 15 minutes.
- Installs in less than a minute.
- Adds less than 1 second to boot time.
Light:
- Uses less than 6MB memory even without the Gamer Mode performance boost.
- Needs less than 50MB hard disk space on installation.
- Runs only 2 processes at a time.
- Performance graphs display CPU and memory usage and how little Norton is using.

Although it's typical to think "yeah right" when you hear a company making claims such as these, it's worth noting that in Walt Mossberg's Wall Street Journal review of the new 2009 edition of Norton AV, he wrote that Symantec had "largely succeeded" in addressing the typical issues with AV software (slowdowns, bloat, annoyances, etc). "It isn't perfect," he writes, "but it is the fastest, simplest and least obtrusive security suite I have ever used." Remember, gamers, don't let this happen to you!

Tags: antivirus, AV, gamers, gaming, PC games, performance, symantec

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vcsjones
ASP.NET MVP

I used Symantec back in 2006. The software was so bloated and horrible I will never give them a chance again to redeem. I use NOD32 now, which, from VirusBulletin is the best rated for actually finding viruses and frequent definitions, and the memory footprint is so small that even if you are gaming while it's active it doesn't have an impact.

sarahintampa

In reply to vcsjones

#Dec 11th, 2008 @ 1:54 PM

I just gave 2009 a free trial and it seemed pretty good...i still hate paying for AV though, when there are free options available, but something this lightweight was aaaaallllmost worth it Smiley

vcsjones
ASP.NET MVP

Ehh... I've done a lot of research on the free one's like Avast and AVG Free. They never do very well when it comes to actually detecting the virus, and when it does it never actually removes it sucessfully.

It's nice to see that Symantec is making improvements to make their software lightweight. They reduced the installation size by turning off Windows System Restore during the installation [ref: http://www.eset.com/threat-center/blog/?p=153] That seems kinda shady to me, wouldn't you think?