Norton Anti-Virus vs. Horizons

[gopher65]

Woo! I finally got McAfee uninstalled. Actually, that was easy. Cancelling my subscription, that was the hard part. Boot time is about 4 times faster now:P. Everything is faster now actually. Stupid McAfee.

I installed AVG. Seems to be alright so far.

[Soars]

Yay! Glad you worked through it gopher.

[gopher65]

Yay! Glad you worked through it gopher.

Wellll, I didn't say that. I have a couple other problems as well. But at least one of the three is gone.

When I first boot the game it goes to a blank screen for like... 10 minutes (sometimes less, sometimes more) and then it either loads or has a transport error. The transport error seems to happen a good 2 out of every 3 attempts.

Does anyone else have this happen to them? I know of one other person, but I'm curious if this is widespread or not.

System specs:

2.8gHz P4 - non-hyperthreaded
1.5 gigs of ram
nVidia 6600GT 128 meg video card
Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 1 soundcard
WinXP Home, fully patched.

All my drivers should also be either the latest or almost the latest ones.

[Justa Mirage]

I ripped the sound blaster card out and used the onboard sound card

Some people have posted in the tech forum that SB drivers can cause that... try getting in game and "disabling the sound" or "disable your sound card" temporarily to see if the game loads faster.

[Daedalus]

As far as AVG (free or Paid) It is bad in my book because of the few false positives it can give. Granted it happens more to people who don't update the program. But then again with Norton (symantic) it updates itself if setup right.

Unfortunately the information you have expressed is entirely incorrect. Recent grading of all AV solutions in the VB100 analysis (completely independant lab tests, no sponsorship involved) demonstrated that Symantec's product offerings were amongst the worst when it comes to false positives. Also AVG updates itself automatically without any onus upon the end user to configure it unless they want to.

Let us not forget either that in May it was Symantec AV products that crippled over 50 thousand Chinese users' computers (edit reason - crippled the computers, not the users themselves!) by incorrectly identifying part of Windows XP as malware. In the same month, the widely used email client Pegasus was also incorrectly identified as a trojan by Symantec's products.

As a final note, if you want a reason to change to a reliable AV solution, then maybe the following info will provide the final nail in the coffin. A little over a week ago a major security flaw was discovered in some components bundled with almost every Symantec security product currently available. Buffer overflow, remote execution, privelidge escalation to name but a few flaws, these poorly coded components have already become the target of widespread abuse over the last week. The details of the exploit are on the Secunia website for all to peruse at their leisure.

[gopher65]

I ripped the sound blaster card out and used the onboard sound card

Some people have posted in the tech forum that SB drivers can cause that... try getting in game and "disabling the sound" or "disable your sound card" temporarily to see if the game loads faster.

Hmm. This is interesting. I went into the "ClientPrefs_Common.def" file and set all the sound prefs to false. The game loaded completely in only a few seconds (both with and without a loading screen), and it looked perfectly normal. I could attack, use abilities, and move around. But the moment I tried to cast a spell I would crash immediately after the spell finished casting. I know they finished casting because when I cast a gift it would be there when I relogged.

After testing this out for about an hour (turning various options on and off one at a time), I've found that if I set "bool soundEnabled = false" the game loads quickly, but crashes when I try to cast a spell. If I set it to true, then the game takes a loooong time to load (like 2-3 minutes, not that long I guess. But a lot longer than the 10 to 20 seconds it takes with that option turned off), but it no longer seems to have that blank screen for 10 minutes at a time.

So yeah, this must have something to do with that darn creative soundcard.

These are the options I looked at:
bool musicOn = false
bool soundOn = false
bool soundEnabled = true
bool minimal3DSound = false
bool interfaceSounds = false
bool combatMusicOn = false
bool soundEmittersEnabled = false

Anyway this seems to have solved the main problem. I can live with 3 minute login times. It's a lot better than the 0 to 20 minute wait (plus a 2/3 chance of a transport error) *before* I got to the 3 minute login that was taking place before.

[D0ZeR]

Unfortunately the information you have expressed is entirely incorrect. Recent grading of all AV solutions in the VB100 analysis (completely independant lab tests, no sponsorship involved) demonstrated that Symantec's product offerings were amongst the worst when it comes to false positives. Also AVG updates itself automatically without any onus upon the end user to configure it unless they want to.

Let us not forget either that in May it was Symantec AV products that crippled over 50 thousand Chinese users' computers (edit reason - crippled the computers, not the users themselves!) by incorrectly identifying part of Windows XP as malware. In the same month, the widely used email client Pegasus was also incorrectly identified as a trojan by Symantec's products.

As a final note, if you want a reason to change to a reliable AV solution, then maybe the following info will provide the final nail in the coffin. A little over a week ago a major security flaw was discovered in some components bundled with almost every Symantec security product currently available. Buffer overflow, remote execution, privelidge escalation to name but a few flaws, these poorly coded components have already become the target of widespread abuse over the last week. The details of the exploit are on the Secunia website for all to peruse at their leisure.

Been using Norton for years and haven't got any false positives. But I will state I know the illegal copies out there will cause problems. A lot of people use illegal keys have problems then blame the program.

Also no program is without bugs. Even you're great AVG. Plus I wonder why so many users have been getting so many false positives with AVG in Vanguard (oh right they didn't update it).

Either way we could argue all day about which one is best. I have never been infected so Norton will always be the one I use.

[Daedalus]

Hello Dozer. I am not here to argue about what is better. I leave that to independant lab tests such as VB100 certification. Considering they are provided with the vendors' preferred version of AV software for the purpose of the testing and certification I seriously doubt illegal product keys are a factor in the poor results portrayed by Symantec and McAfee products. It is worth pointing out that I did not mention how AVG fared in those same tests.

I do not dolt on AVG in the way you appear to dolt over Symantec's products. I merely recommend it because it is proven to be one of the most reliable free antivirus solutions available to consumers. There are alternatives mentioned in this topic, and people are free to choose whichever product they like. It is because people deserve the freedom to make an educated decision that I felt it necessary to point out the innacuracies in your claims.

I am not familiar with Vanguard directly however my wife plays it. Yes, she uses AVG. No, she has never encountered an issue with false positives relating to Vanguard (or any product installed on her system for that matter). For the record, the AVG product has enabled automatic updates by default for the last 7 years at the very least. I fail to see how someone can avoid the automatic updates unless they turn this off or hit the cancel button when the dialogue box informing the end user of the update appears on the screen. If the end user does nothing, the update goes ahead without the need for user intervention.

I respect your decision to use the Norton / Symantec antivirus product. Similarly you should respect other peoples' decisions, instead of trying to sully the reputation of products with entirely innacurate information.

[Tryagain]

I can tell you this both products are guilty of heavy false positives. But AVG is a free product and combine it with some free antispyware and firewall products out there you can be assured your system is pretty rock solid secure.

Problem with Norton and McAfee products is that they both make heavy assumptions and are way to intrusive in their zeal to protect ones computer. If anything both Nortons and McAfee examplify how badly the current Horizons client is and all the writing it does to a hard drive. The game can alone kill a hard drive. I remember times where my HD light simply would not go off. That doesn't happen with any other game.

So I hope the new people can do something finally about the overbloated pig the horizons client is.

[gopher65]

I remember times where my HD light simply would not go off. That doesn't happen with any other game.

Vanguard:P.

[dorrin]

wow. this is all very interesting to me... i haven't had the "staring at the sky for 10 minutes upon logging in" thing (only once in recent memory), but i do take FOREVER to log in. frequently it freezes up and i force-quit using the task manager several times before i even see the load screen (even when i give it 2 or 3 minutes). also, the first time i port somewhere i frequently freeze up and have to force-quit. however... usually once i go through all this, i'm fine.. until i shut down the computer or reboot. every new boot it's like this, and the computer gets too warm for me to just leave it on.
i also tend to freeze up for very long periods of time the first time it needs to load the target ring and various animations, especially dragon -> khutit and back.

[Henry Redacre]

(I'm quoting slightly out of order here, bear with me)

The game can alone kill a hard drive.

Indeed. It completely killed my old 40GB. =(

If anything both Nortons and McAfee examplify how badly the current Horizons client is and all the writing it does to a hard drive.

Is HZ actually writing to the drive? Or is it reading from the drive with all that activity? With all those little .def files, I figured it was mostly reading those files, as opposed to making changes to them. Of course though, I don't really know spit about what's actually going on, that's just my understanding of it.

Now, if it's a case of HZ doing a majority of reads, as opposed to writes, then this is looking very, very sexy.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/08/...drives_cometh/

Although, I can hardly justify dropping a couple hundred dollars on a piece of specialty equipment for one game, simply because the game could use some improvement.

But still, that flash-based HDD looks like a perfect marriage for HZ.

[Tryagain]

the Horizons client not only reads but writes a plenty. When I used to play this game I had a seperate drive just to run Horizons on. If I put it on any other drive EVEN with NTFS I would have fragmentation issues. So yeah definitely one thing you could do if you were hot to trot for Horizons is buying even a 10,000 RPM drive. Thats about the extent of hardware I would consider for a game that is as old as HZ.

Dorrin those symptoms are of a computer that doesn't have the memory and a hard drive that can't keep up with the initial load of HZ I might also bet it happens when you go into a new area for the first time. Might want to look at ram upgrades so your computer doesn't do so much virtual memory swapping ( which is done to the hard drive ).

Maybe the new guys will consider a new client sometime ?

[AA0]

HZ reads and writes like mad. The world cache is a complete nightmare for fragmentation....
The article talks that Flash drives are poor for server and file hosting type situations, that is almost what you need for horizons though.

[dorrin]

my older computer actually loads HZ faster simply due to the fact that it doesn't freeze up. it loads slow as molasses, but it keeps plugging away. if it weren't for the fact that i get better FPS on the newer system (the one i run it on, which has an AMD athlon 64 and 1G of ram), i'd just run it on the older system... it shouldn't be an upgrade problem. the issues i'm having now i didn't used to have on this computer. unfortunately i can't remember exactly when it started. :/

[Justa Mirage]

Oh I had the chance to mess with the computer last night and found the "exceptions" area and placed the horizons directory in it (with subdirectories checked) and now the game boots in about 1/2 minute without needing to disable it.

Interesting thread though

[gopher65]

Dorrin those symptoms are of a computer that doesn't have the memory and a hard drive that can't keep up with the initial load of HZ I might also bet it happens when you go into a new area for the first time. Might want to look at ram upgrades so your computer doesn't do so much virtual memory swapping ( which is done to the hard drive ).

No. I have this same problem as Dorrin. You can't tell me 1.5 gigs of DDR3200, and a 3 gig page file on a seperate HD from HZ isn't enough to run the game. But my point is, that it didn't USE to happen to me, on this same computer. The differences are that now: 1) I have more ram. 2) I have a faster second harddrive that HZ runs on. 3) I have a faster CPU. 4) I have a newer graphics card.

This is the same computer, but with a few upgrades. Now it freezes up on a regular basis, and takes between 0 and 20 minutes to start loading the game at startup.

Or it did. turning off all the sound in the game fixed that.

[Goriax]

Hmmm. While I agree with the general comments about Norton and McAfee, I should say that I do have Norton and it isn't too bad right now. I'm at work and can't remember what I did to tame it although I"m pretty sure I didn't exclude any directories (would have only helped with HZ and I do more on my comp then play games). It may be that I turned off the on access scan and settled for doing regular full system scans, keeping my patches current, and thumbing my nose at their so-called warnings that my system is less secure. I've had no problem with viruses for several years.

I really see no point in scanning the exact same file 200,000,000,000 times over and over again.

I agree with the general comments though. Sometimes I think that the people running Norton and McAfee think we buy computers for the sole purpose of running virus scanners.

[Tryagain]

Gopher try reducing your pagefile with 1.5GB of ram you want to discourage Windows from using swap memory so much. At 2GB of ram for example its almost a safe bet to reduce it down to 500MB.

[Deth]

Using Vista and AVG I was crashing when porting under the new Blight client and had long port times on both servers. I turned of the scan for the Horizons folder and port times reduced and I am no longer crashing on blight when attempting to port. So looks like exempting horizons for all virus scanners might be in order.