Why is it horrible? People just love to hate on Norton, and if this was 4 years ago...I'd agree (really used to be a major resource hog). But I've had no issues with Norton 360, I've been using it for 2 years now (mainly because I have product keys that will last me around 5-6 years....) Although it may use more resources than some, it doesn't slow my machine any, and has kept my system clean.
Always have malwarebytes, combo fix, r kill file back up on a usb just incase the virus prevent those software to work/update. After everything is clear befor connecting to the internet be sure to renew your ip. Go to cmd prompt and type in "ipconfig /flushdns"
I'd imagine you have a pretty decent system though. For anything relatively new, you can work through (or ignore) the resource issues. There are a lot of people out there who are running on some pretty basic rigs. And Norton certainly doesn't care (in terms of who it advertises to) what you have when they recommend you go with their 'full solution'. I find regular, standard Norton Antivirus is fine for just about everyone (certainly it's no better or worse at finding a lot of these "Fake" security center trojans), but when you start going into 360 territory - though it is better than it once was - I still can't openly recommend it. It's much safer to direct people to, say, Microsoft Security Essentials than tell them to pick up Norton and take the risk of them going with a full featured 360 and slowing down their (already virus prone/previously damaged) 3 year old Vista machine even worse.
I have to agree with this as well. I've got a quad-core setup with 4 gb of ram or so (nothing extremely fancy), but it's more than capable of running resource hoggers/cpu-intensive programs. I've used 360 as well and it's nice, but I feel like you need at least a good dual-core to where you get the protection you want and at the same time not at the cost of your entire pc slowing down. This isn't a bagging on post, but what sort of system do you have Uprising? Just to get an idea.
Can you take a screenshot of the flickering dash with your phone? I assume that you've got a desktop or another comp to upload it with since you created this thread. That'll help a bit more as the flickering dash problem doesn't quite sound like any sort of virus/trojan that I've heard of before.
Looks like the newest version is improved over old versions in terms of system performance. I wouldn't call it 'horrible' after reading this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381182,00.asp Pros Best firewall. Consistently high lab results. Top scores in PCMag's malware removal testing, improved scores in malware blocking. Very low performance impact. Simple, effective spam filtering. Top phishing protection. Local and online backup. Cons Parental control lacks features found in Norton Online Family Premium. Beaten by some in PCMag's malware blocking tests. Bottom Line Norton 360 Version 5.0 has all the protective power of Norton Internet Security 2011, but with a friendlier face. You can dig for details but it won't push them at you. And it scored very, very well in my performance tests. It remains PCMag's Editors' Choice for security mega-suites. I'm still sure that there are better solutions out there for free and pay...in my experience, norton/symantec has really dropped off in the past few years from when it was king.
