BlueIce, I feel that will be a waste of time and money, and you...

BlueIce,

I feel that will be a waste of time and money, and you will most likely not see any improvement in responsiveness with your system. You said you have 1 gig? On XP?? This is sufficient for what you are doing. The issue here is most likely with your system being underpowered, Norton being a bloated slug. Check also that you have not enabled advanced heuristics scanning, or scanning all files on access. Maybe tone the settings down a bit, (not sure on what norton offers in settings, so search around a bit) such as smart scan (don't scan files that have not been modified since last scan/access), scan by extension etc... Also, is it doing a full system scan each and every day? Some AV does this, and is stupid IMO. Also, delay startup scan till OS is up and running (say five minutes in).

Think about it mate, you are about to buy more memory for a stupid AV program which is inadequate at what it does anyway. Poor detection rates and the works. And the installation of more memory will not solve your problem. Why not dump Norton, and go get a decent AV program, such as Kaspersky IS, or Nod32. If you were to get Nod AV for example, you could then use comodo firewall which is free version, and you will be much better off.

CHeers GReg