Norton 360

[pehhawaiiisland]

Hello, Should I have "early load" enabled? I looked this subject up and the forum advised to leave it on for maximum protection, but the date of this advice was 2008. This was before Norton Insight. Is it recommenced to turn it on? This setting will cause eventual file corruptness on my machine and takes forever for my PC to load. Am I safe with the default setting? thanks, Paul

[g_cafe_c]

The only thing I wondered about was how Early Load would affect speed responsiveness of the computer and how fast would Windows start-up.  So far, I notice nothing; no slowness, even if measurably present.  As for your worry about corrupting files, let other knowledgable members respond.  "PC Load" does not take forever, and from how I find, does not take noticibly longer than without Early Load turned on.

[pehhawaiiisland]

Norton has "no early start" by default. I read so many different opinions. I will wait for an official "yes or no " here.

[delphinium Norton Fighter]

The preferred answer is that yes, early load should be turned on.  Having said that, however, I found that XP sp3 was sensitive to early load and my machine worked better with it off. 

On Win 7, the boot is so fast compared that I don't think that it will make much difference.  Most of what is actually causing a slow boot is the network connecting, authenticating and allowing all the programs, including Norton to connect.  I have early load turned off and it still loads up before any network connection, which is what you want.

[pehhawaiiisland]

To add to this:Logic would dictate that Symantec Engineers made things work efficiently with minimum hassle to a user by carefully designing the software to work by a set of default rules so the user would not have to fret over details like this. I have no idea how Norton 360 works so I trust their default rules,and it seems to work best like that.It's the only answer I can come up with, just run 360 by default rules if you want a peaceful PC experience. Paul

[g_cafe_c]

More details of what is here:

Norton 360 version 4 on Windows Vista:  Early Load is turned on and I find no slowness in startup nor of computer operation.

Norton Internet Security 2010 version 17.7 on Windows XP, Service Pack 3: Early Load is turned on and I find no slowness in startup nor of computer operation.

Maybe other system details would be relevant, but I do not remember them.

[SendOfJive Norton Fighter]

Definitive answers from Symantec::

PieterV in this post:

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AutoProtect always loads at system start, the difference is how early.

If you enable early load, AP will start immediately after the filesystem drivers load, this allows AP to scan other drivers as they load.  The downside to early load is that it makes the boot slower because more files are scanned.

AP early load will automatically turn on after any threat is found that requires a reboot to remediate.

Once the machine again scans clean, the previous setting is restored.

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And Garret_Polk said this:

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Auto-Protect Early Load will set Auto-Protect to load earlier in the boot process. This will protect against malware that also loads early in the boot process, if there is any on the system, which there shouldn't be unless you turned off protection at some point or something. It will slow down the boot process since we are scanning more files.

If we detect any infections on the machine that require a reboot to repair we automatically set Auto-Protect to run in Early Load mode until we declare the machine clean. This automatically protects against any other malware that loads at boot time.

It makes repairing possible for some of the nastier infections but it isn't required to be on. If you don't mind the couple extra seconds of boot time you can turn it on.

[pehhawaiiisland]

Thank you send-of-jive for this information.I'm going to "snip" this and save it to my documents. Great post here, thanks!!! regards, Paul