Norton Internet Security / Norton AntiVirus

[Nevintsha]

No, it continues when I set it in silent mode. Takes a few seconds to bring up the silent mode option. I have even disabled norton for a small period to see if anything changed. I have done these before, should have mentioned it in my list in first post.

[Bombastus]

Hello again,

I looked at your screenshot of CPU usage through the PM link, and it does not actually show any special CPU usage at all. Most of it is used by the Task Manager itself, and that's because it's open at the time of taking the screenshot. Both of Nortons processeS are utilizing 0% of the CPU.

If you mean the high CPU usage for the "System Idle Process", that is actually the opposite of what it looks like. The higher the number for the System Idle Process, the less you CPU is being utilized. A CPU can never do just nothing, so when nothing else is going on, it runs this System Idle Process. Consider it your CPU rolling its thumbs. So the higher number for this process, the less your CPU is actually being utilized. A System Idle Process that shows 99% CPU usage means that your system is in a complete idle state, with the CPU being stressed minimally.

[Nevintsha]

The CPU always sits around 20 - 30% for me unless I play a game or publishing a movie on movie maker, then it shoots up to 60% usage during games and about 90% during movie publishing.

Whenever the computer is behaving slow the CPU usage reamins just as low as it is when it is running normal. In otherwords, the HDD light sits solid bright while the computer is behaving slow and unresponssive, but the cpu useage remains at around 30% useage and physical memory at 50. Now when it is behaving properly, efficent, and with speed, the useage is also the same amount of useage. 

This is why I cannot find what is slowing it down so much and at random. Things such as closing out a program (any program, dosn't matter) will trigger it to slow down; waking it up from sleep mode can trigger it; Leaving it to itself; logging in can trigger it; downloading a program, installing a program, opening a program, anything I click is a possibility that it will suddenly slow down. Its a volatile mess! :S

Taskmanager may displays the signs of a clean running computer that is running perfectly fine, but it is not always true. Perhaps my operating system is corrupt? I thought restoring it back to factory settings would fix that.

Well we know now that it isn't Norton that is causing it. Its hard to find just exactly what is causing this to happen. I have scanned the hardware with diagnostics tools so many times and they are all displaying a healthy machine. The registry appears to be clean of errors and broken file paths, web history and cookies gone, spyware and malware non existent, and defragmented hard drive. This machine is evile xD

[lmacri Super Phishing Phryer]

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Nevintsha wrote:

The CPU always sits around 20 - 30% for me unless I play a game or publishing a movie on movie maker, then it shoots up to 60% usage during games and about 90% during movie publishing.

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Hi Nevintsha:

I'm not sure that it's safe to rule out NIS with the information we have at the moment.  Your screenshot in message # 3 shows that you had over 1,279,000 disk reads associated with ccSvcHst.exe, but this may not be unusual if your PC has not been re-booted for a long time.  Dev9999 had out-of-date FIleZilla software running on his machine that caused a handle leak and excessive memory usage by ccScvHst.exe that was solved by simply uninstalling FileZilla (see here) and you could also have similar software that is significantly out-of-date since you restored your system back to it's factory defaults.  We've also seen cases where the Insight Optimizer task never terminated correctly and caused excessive CPU usage by ccSvcHst.exe because of a corrupted NIS installation (see here), and performing a clean re-install of NIS using the Norton Removal Tool as instructed here was the only solution for this high CPU usage.

Could you post a screenshot of the CPU graph in your Norton Tasks window for a 90 minute interval (see my screenshot in message # 5) so we can see if this high CPU usage is by ccSvcHst.exe or another process?  If you're seeing high CPU usage by a non-Norton process (i.e., blue peaks in the graph) then click your mouse over the peak to display the process name.

When you say you CPU usage always sits at 20 - 30%, are you certain you aren't talking about Commit Charge for your virtual memory?  The screenshot below was taken with Microsoft's Process Explorer v. 15 (available for download here) rather than Task Manager.  Process Explorer will show the commit charge in the bottom status bar and you can sort the CPU column in descending order and see the % of your CPU used by each process loaded into memory.

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Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit SP2 * NIS 2011 v. 18.6.0.29 * IE 9.0 * Firefox 9.0.1
HP Pavilion dv6835ca, Intel Core2Duo CPU T5550 @ 1.83 GHz, 3.0 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS