Another Happy Nody

Greetings to fellow denizens of the land of NOD!

I recently installed 2.5 on the family's older Celeron 1.1 GHz with 256 MB RAM running XP Home under three user accounts. NOD replaced an Internet Security Suite that also begins with N. No, this is not a tale of "after installing NOD32 it found 1300 trojans, viruses, and worms that the previous #%&*$ bloated av missed." Actually, the last scan by the old av found zero badies and an in-depth full scan by the newly installed NOD found exactly the same amount.

Rather, this is a tale of recovering the usefulness of a computer that had become so slow over the years with successive upgrades of said security suite from 2002 to 2005 versions that it may as well have been infected with 1300 malwares. Even my ever more frequent file and crap cleaning and defragging was having little effect at speeding up the tired old box. Enter NOD32 (crank up the volume here! - play Rossini's William Tell Overture!).

Yes! NOD returned it to a quick responsive machine again! Fast at booting and switching users, more powerful with freed-up precious RAM, able to access the internet in the blink of a jolly green eye! And since I had replaced a suite, I also installed NetVeda firewall, another remarkably efficient piece of work, and lo and behold! the quickness remained!

Summary Evaluation:

Installation - Fast and easy, nice set of default settings.

Detection rates - Heck, what do I know? only the tests I see that show some av's marginally higher.

Heuristics - NOD's forte of course.

Regained pleasurable use of computer - Priceless.

 

I think you forgot to mention the seamless updating.

 

Yes I echo what Grumble said, nice not to have 4 to 5 'services' running to do what nobodies knows and to have a speedy boot and quicker pc operations.

As to being better, well it has caught quite a few nasties for me but so did the one from 'S' only nod is quicker.

 

Don't forget to run the Norton Cleanup Tool (if you haven't already), this will give you back even a little more performance.

 

I ran the 'Morgan removal tool' which involved going through the registry after I had used add/remove and took out all the references to Syamantec and norton. they should be shot for the crap that is left behind after an unistall

 

one thing I'd recommend for a modest machine such as this celeron with 256mb, is to turn OFF the custom graphics in NOD32 - it's supposed to save a couple of mb - and with XP and only 256mb, you will probably find the savings useful - even in XP home.

hth

Greg

 

Thanks for the tips, all. I did some fairly extensive cleaning on removal of the old av and will do even more to be sure every remnant of the old stuff is gone. I hadn't considered turning off the custom graphics option, but have now, nice idea! The beauty of NOD32 is in the many options available to tweak it to the realities of one's own system.

Unfortunately, this particular Compaq model (5300 US) seems to use some kind of a unique RAM costing around $70 for another 256 MB, rather than the more generic RAM available at the discount stores for $20. As I said earlier though, the computer loads, runs, shuts down and does everything else nicely now.

 

To be honest, I sincerely doubt that the 5300US requires such special memory. Looking up the specs on HP's website, it says that the computer comes with PC133 RAM, and the i815 chipset motherboard maxes out at 512 MB RAM.

A plain stick of 256 MB PC133 RAM should do nicely. The CAS Latency values (CL) should not matter, as the motherboard will automatically adjust itself to run the memory at the most compatible value.

My experience with memory upgrades for Compaq, HP, Dell, etc., is that the issue of "memory compatibility" is almost always blown way out of proportion. If you can find a cheap stick of PC133 at your local shop, I venture to say that it will work just fine. The main issue with PC133 these days is availability because it is old.

 

Hi Grumble,
Glad to hear your good report. Thanks for posting

 

Yeah, NOD rocks...it's a pleasure to use it.

 

This is my second year using Nod. It and LNS has givin my old computer a new lease on life - P3 (still going strong).