Last month I used Norton’s Live Help to try and resolve the problem of my laptop’s slow start-up, the cause of which appeared to be Norton taking a long time to register its green ‘Protected’ status.
The technician who took control of my laptop concluded that Norton could only load after its sidebar icon had loaded and it was the delay in this icon loading that was causing start-up to take 8 minutes regardless of how many or how few other programmes he set as enabled/disabled either within Norton’s Start-Up Manager or from within ‘msconfig’, as well turning on and off ‘Early Load’ within Antivirus/Settings. His recommendation to resolve the 360 Sidebar Icon issue was to upgrade from Norton 360 v.3 to v.4. However, as his various trials and tests had already taken over an hour to reach this point I was unable to stay online any longer and we had to end the session before upgrading.
Yesterday, I finally got around to upgrading to v.4 but the problem remains, albeit manifesting itself in a slightly different manner.
The slow start-up process under v.3 happened like this: 3 minutes after commencing ‘start-up’ the sidebar would appear but the Norton 360 icon shown in the sidebar would take a further 5 minutes to change from its ‘spinning circle of dots’ status to its green ‘protected’ status. Once the sidebar icon showed ‘protected’ a similar ‘protected’ 360 icon would appear in the bottom RHS taskbar. Furthermore, until ‘protected’ status was shown I was unable to open/use any programme.
Now that I’ve upgraded to v.4, start-up is still taking 8 minutes but the order of how things appear on screen has changed. Firstly, a ‘Protected’ icon appears in the bottom RHS taskbar after only 2 minutes but I am still unable to open/use any programme until the sidebar Norton icon appears. However, whereas under v.3 the sidebar would appear after 3 minutes but show a spinning 360 icon for a further 5 minutes, now the sidebar doesn’t appear at all until all 8 minutes have fully passed and when it finally does appear the 360 icon is already in ‘Protected’ mode.
I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro A200laptop running Vista Business SP2 (32 bit) with 4GB of 667MHz RAM (256MB VRAM), an Intel Core2 Duo T7500 2.20GHz processor and 200GB HDD of which only 64GB is currently used (136GB is free). I don’t have any games loaded and primarily use this laptop for basic Microsoft applications (Word, Excel, Windows Mail, Internet Explorer) and AutoCAD 2004
If anyone is able to suggest a solution I would be most grateful.
Regards,
Ian
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