Incredibly slow web browsing

I installed the trial version of NOD32 (v3.0.669.0) last week and I'm very disappointed. Using Firefox 3 or IE7, any given page now takes about 10 time longer to display--for example, for a complex page that took 8 seconds to display using Firefox, it now takes about 90 seconds--that is not acceptable. If I "x" out Firefox web browser, it works fine, but that defeats some of the features I wanted from NOD32.

I'm using a pretty fast machine (Dual core 3 GHz 64 bit processor, 3GB mem) running 32 bit Vista Home Premium.

Any ideas as to why it is this slow? Is this "normal"? If not, how do I fix it?

Thanks.

 

Did you tick the browser in active mode(originally)?

 

No, I did not. I simply installed Nod32 and made no changes to any settings and Firefox was very slow. That's when I started to explore the settings and found I could "turn off" Firefox and then saw the snappy performance return.

 

forget v3, try the new v4

 

Hi,

What settings for real-time protection do you have enabled? Perhaps unticking "advanced heuristics" for real-time protection only (advanced mode>set-up>advanced set-up>real-time file system protection>setup>options) will solve this issue.

Hope this resolves your issue!

 

Thanks for the reply. If I "untick" that feature, that removes that capability--I was trying to get the full function and protection from NOD32 (and what was tested in the reviews), but based on the support response from NOD32, I guess I have to turn off something.

After contacting customer support, they sent me a canned response which said to exclude the web browsers by placing the red X in the box--that's what I already did and told them that. That was a lot of help! I guess that was them confirming they have a problem.

Boy, am I not impressed. They advertise all theses great features and protection, but you have to disable them to get it to perform reasonably. I guess a fast dual core processor with high speed disks and buses and plenty of memory are not good enough for this application. Am I missing something here?

Maybe its still worth keeping as the parts I have not disabled are supposed to be very good. I'm trying to find a better alternative to Norton (which I get free from my employer) for my 3 machines at home--I'm willing to pay for something better, but not sure I'll keep this going after the trial runs out . . .

If anyone else has any suggestions, I'd love to here from you.

Thanks..

 

Jamitt, I actually recommend you follow this advice and uninstall v3 and try out v4 on your machine which is free. See how it performs with default settings and then go ahead and start tweaking.

 

I had checked out the postings regarding V4 and I was reluctant to try it due to all the unresolved issues. Do you think it is stable? Do you think it will substantially improve the performance?

Thanks.

 

I got the same problem,but also extremly slow opening of some other programs .....it was just the options ADVANCED HEURISTICS in NOD AV 3 that I turned on.....after turning off all was working perfectly and fast.

 

Hes machine is more than capable of handling AH. I'm betting it's a problem with networking and v4 uses that differently.

 

ok, I uninstalled v3 and installed v4 beta. No improvement, and in some ways worse as the ability to turn off specific applications (with the red X) is no longer a feature in v4. I had to turn off "Enable HTTP Checking" to recover the performance. Turning off all the various heuristics and ThreatSense engine parameters under Web Access made no change (and in fact, I'm can't tell if these switches actually do anything). And turning off "Enable Web Access Protection" did not work at all (but when I turned off "Enable HTTP Checking" that automatically turned off "Enable Web Access Protection"). This seems to have effectively accomplished the same thing I did in v3 by disabling the protection for specific browsers.

Bottom line: the web access protection is not useful for me as the resulting performance is abysmal (but its a really good idea if it worked).

If anyone from ESET is reading this and they care (I say that as their customer service people clearly don't care from their pathetic earlier response I got from them), I need to better understand what is happening here. Is this slow performance normal, and if you want this great protection, you need to live with that? If it is not normal, then what is different with my setup that is causing it? Is there some other software that might be negatively interacting with this feature?

I clearly cannot recommend this software to friends, co-workers, and my employer (corporate IT department) if web access protection is a wanted feature. The rest of the features in the application seems to work well from what I can tell so far.

 

Formally used Symantec Antivirus (corporate version) for Vista. I uninstalled it, then used Norton's cleaning tool, then cleaned-up the registry by hand to remove the last couple of entries.

I'm currently using ZoneAlarm 7.1.078.000 Firewall (no antivirus or spyware) and Spybot Search & Destroy 1.5.2. (Both of these were installed prior to installing NOD32.) Windows Defender and Windows Firewall are turned off.

Running Vista Home Premium, no service packs or updates installed.

Wired connection to 16 MB/s cable broadband via Linksys WRT54G router.

Please let me know if there is additional info needed. I really want to make this work if possible.

Thanks.