I'll make this short, because I'm royally pissed:
Due to the line of work that I'm in, my extended family occasionally asks me to put together computers for them (trust me it's not my idea of fun, but when my 68 year old aunt asks for help getting a new laptop, well, I feel obliged to help her out). I basically called one of my distributors and got her a laptop at cost (thank you mr. vendor), and because she's a little financially strapped, there was no ThinkPad in her future, and I'm typing this on an Acer Travelmate 2420 (yes, cheap, she needed Internet access and MS Word, for under $500, this did the trick). By the way, my rep tells me that Acer makes all of Dell's laptops, go figure.
Anyway, after putting this thing together, and by together I mean reloading XPhome, running all of the updates, adding antivirus, MS Office, etc etc, the machine runs like crap. And I mean S L O W L Y, so slowly that just running IE causes the screen paint. So 3 hours after discovering the slowness and trying everything I know to get the machine to perform as I expect, I googled ccAPP.exe which seemed to be eating memory and basically going ape shit on the machine.
ccApp turns out to be Norton antivirus' agent for real time protection. I unloaded it, loaded up McAfee and the machine is screaming fast.
So, in summary, screw you Norton AV, you took 3 hours out of my life on a Sunday with your shit product.
What does this mean to everyone on here? If you have Norton AV, dump it, get McAfee and watch your machine's performance improve.