Symantec Releases Norton AntiVirus "Gaming Edition"

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
From our front-page news:
One common complaint I hear often with regards to anti-virus applications is that they can suck the fun right out of your gaming. The problem could either be simple, such as a pop-up that boots you to your desktop, or a more complicated one where portions of your online game won't function at all (eg: updaters). Sadly, the most common answer to someone's predicament is usually, "Just turn the AV off.", which is clearly the wrong one.

Symantec seems to recognize this fact and have released a "Gaming Edition" of their anti-virus software. Its "Gamer Mode" essentially allows you to halt almost all operation during gameplay, except virus detection. This means that you'll receive no pop-ups during gameplay, nor will the AV even download updates. All it will do is continue to monitor the system in case a virus happens to make it onto your system during use.

That basically sums up what the "Gaming Edition" is all about. The respective product-page also has a few bits of information that might be of interest to some. Symantec touts that during regular use, the AV will use an average of 5.38MB of RAM, and that its install size is 49.7MB. That's impressive, especially since Norton tends to be known as being one of the more "bloated" AVs out there. I'm not much of a Windows user, and I don't run an AV even when I do use it, but this new version has me tempted.

norton_antivirus_gamer_edition_112508.jpg

Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition is the fastest virus protection you can get. It stops spyware, worms, bots, and other threats cold—without slowing down your PC. When you're gaming, your protection should get out of the way. Norton AntiVirus 2009 Gaming Edition does exactly that.


Source: Symantec Norton AntiVirus Gaming Edition
 

Kougar

Techgage Staff
Staff member
That's very interesting, its to bad you have to buy that specific version to get it though. It would've been enough reason to buy one of those $0 AMIR boxes from Frys.

And I still think having a program that updates/checks for definition updates every 5-15 minutes during everyday use is excessive.
 

Merlin

The Tech Wizard
I still say the NOD32 is the best AV protection you can get.
You don't even know it's running
I'm still getting trouble calls of slow surf, then I see why, they have Norton AV, and even McAffe has the same effect as Norton
I'd like to see a comparison of how much Norton eats away, as opposed to NOD32
 

Rob Williams

Editor-in-Chief
Staff member
Moderator
An anti-virus comparison is an idea I've been tossing around for a while, but I haven't been able to settle on the perfect methodology for testing. Ideally, it'd be interesting to test a slew of such applications and see which one is the most efficient, has the smallest footprint, is the least-intrusive, et cetera. I think aside from simply viewing RAM usage, something like that would be very difficult to measure from a performance perspective.

Any ideas guys?
 
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