[OrganisM]

It's not a competition, it's about not destroying his computer while offering help. -_-

Note how when I saw the processes listed I went HOLY FCUK? That might have something to do with what looked like three antivirus programs running at once, and an absurd amount of RAM usage from background/startup processes.

I've got news for you guys. You know what an antivirus program is? A big, clunky, poorly written virus that you may or may not be paying for. It inserts itself in places in your registry you sure as hell didn't ask it to, it monitors everything you do, and has a large degree of control over your computer. And those 70,000+ definitions on Norton? Just to let you know, fewer than 100 viruses are wide-spread or even out there enough to be considered a threat for anybody, and all those "defenitions updates" you pay for are actually BS little scripts created by Norton employees. If you're smart, you will stick with an unobtrusive program that scans your computer at your discretion. At my workplace, I have a mid-sized network setup, and the security is almost all at the network level. The connection is scanned and monitored a thousand times over before it even reaches the network, and I have some safeguards in place in case a computer hacks in and poses as a trusted computer. Almost nothing is ever running on the computers in the network, and thus the computers being used for intense rendering applications are freed to work without being clogged up and bogged down. I understand that security at the network level is not possible for every user, but it is possible to have a degree of security without putting five anti-virus programs on your computer and taking up 1gb of RAM with that and other start-up processes before you even have a chance to start any processes of your own.