McAfee vs. Norton and their speeds question

When we took our computer in to have it cleaned, the tech told us that both Norton and McAfee were "totally unnecessary". He added microsoft security essentials to our computer for free and we have had fantastic luck with it for over 2 years now. He says that both of those antivirus program are really just a scam and not worth the money.

On McAfee, I believe you need to further customize or tweak a few settings: 1. Disable Automatic Scanning McAfee might be slowing down your computer because you have automatic scanning enabled. Scanning the computer for infections while you are trying to do other tasks could be too much for your system if you don't have enough memory or you have a slow processor. 2. Customize Active Protection McAfee has options for active protection against threats. This means that the application starts up one or more processes to scan or shield the computer. Generally speaking, the more processes a computer is running, the slower it will be. I would disable protection for E-mail which does nothing but hog up your resources. 3. Do NOT Full Scan Automatically Since 2010, hard drive technology simply can't allow a full scan to take only a few seconds. Individually checking each file on the disk for infection takes time, and the older/slower your hard drive, the longer it will take. A full scan is also the most resource-intensive task that McAfee can do, so expect other applications to run more slowly. 4. Customize Automatic Updates This is a rather love and hate issue here for people who have limited hardware resources. When your McAfee software is set up to automatically update, you may notice this slowing down your computer or internet connection when it is updating on the background. It will be noticeable when you are engage in video streaming playback or emailing even. So, you need to ask yourself if you are the type that is discipline enough to update your software periodically or you prefer the software do it for you. Even if you let it do it for you, you should set it to "Update but inform you when it is ready for installation" this is to prevent conflicts and compatibility issues. I would normally hold the installation and check with the latest news to see if it might have issues with my programs' official website/support desk. 5. Multiple Security Programs If you have multiple security programs installed on the same system, you may run into problems. This is a result of the applications not trusting each other and fighting for permissions. In general, McAfee is known to be sensitive with such issue and you need to have only one antivirus program installed here. On the hindsight, I am assuming that you are using Windows XP for your OS and I think it will be good to know that MS is discontinuing XP next year. So, you might want to consider upgrading to a new OS and if you do, please check if your present config could meet the basic requirement. I believe you need at least 4GB of RAM and 500GB HDD to avoid any hitch.