Dear community,
I will try to descirbe what happened yesterday when I tried to install NIS 20 on my third XP Pro SP3 pc.
That pc has an Intel M 760 CPU @ 2.00 GHz, and 2 GB DDR2 RAM.
About 34 processes are running incuding the 2 NIS processes.
On my other 2 laptops W7 x64, I have NIS 20.4.0.40 and NIS is working fine, never had an issue.
I thought that maybe it would be time to install NIS 20 on the third XP pc.
When I was on NIS 2012, the 2 ccsvchst processes, occupied about 10 MB of RAM each, when idle, and about 25MB each when NIS performed it's tasks, updating etc.
NIS was totaly silent, which is great and my laptop's fan too. :-)
I went into my NIS account, downloaded NIS downloader and before the new install I uninstalled the previous version and used NRT.
The new installation went good, no problem at all and here come's the INTERESTING part:
I opened NIS 20.4..0.40 which was offered directly, size by side with task manager.
Here are the results, the 2 NIS processes, occupied 67 user and 52 MB system respectively, and increased to 80 or 90 MB when NIS was working.
The CPU was constantly used at 9% when NIS was idle, just it's window opened, and never dropped to 0 to 1% as with NIS 2012.
The only way to stop this unacceptable behavior, was to set performance monitoring to OFF.
That's a first clue.
This behavior was reproducible 3 times with the same amounts after uninstall, using NRT and reinstall.
Needless to say that I immediately reverted to NIS 2012 and it will stay that way unless NIS 21 will do the job correctly.
To me, it is clear that this product was designed for W8 and W7 and not for the "poor" XP cousin.
I'm also concerned by the fact that if things won't improve for XP with the NIS 21 version, will NIS 19 be able to cover my pc correctly next year or it will become obsolete with the newly emerging threats.
I'm waiting for some users to share their thoughts on the matter, and if possible, someone from Symantec could provide an answer.
Thank you.