How To Use Norton System Insight

Overview

Using System Insight, you can get information to help you diagnose why your PC may have slowed down.

• View important events that took place on your system, such as:

• Downloads
• Security Risk Detections
• Quick Scans
• Installations

• Quickly find useful information related to those events.
• Check the performance of your system and compare to events that have taken place.
• Get useful insight about the processes that impact your system.
• Optimize the applications present on your system to avoid system slow-downs over time.

NOTE: If you access Norton System Insight immediately after you install your Norton product, the graphs will be empty since the product has not collected any information yet. As time progresses, the events that take place on your system, as well as its performance utilization, will appear on the respective graphs.

Events Graph 1/2

The Events graph on the Norton System Insight screen gives you information and quick access to all the important events that took place on your system during the last three months.

The horizontal axis shows you the day of the month and the vertical axis shows the event type.

Click a month on the toolbar to see events for that month.

Events Graph 2/2

Let’s say that you downloaded Skype from www.skype.com. Once the download is complete, it will be reflected on the Events graph. For any given day on which you downloaded something, the icon will show the number of items downloaded.

When you move your mouse over the “Downloads” icon, a pop-up window appears with a “View Details” link that takes you to relevant information in Security History.

To learn more about the information provided in Security History, please visit the File Insight Tutorial

Optimize Your System Tab 1/1

Click the “Optimize” button to initiate application optimizations that may improve your system’s start time, as well as help your applications run faster.

You can cancel the optimization task by clicking “Cancel Optimize.”

When optimization is complete a light blue stripe appears on the events graph.

Performance Graph 1/2

Use the performance graph to get a quick view of your system’s performance. You can get information on your system’s CPU Utilization as well as its memory usage.

Click the “CPU” tab to see the CPU Utilization. The horizontal axis shows the elapsed time since the measurement was taken. The vertical axis shows the percentage of the CPU used. The yellow graph shows your Norton product’s CPU usage over time; the blue graph shows the system’s CPU usage. The gray-filled area indicates user idle time.

Move your mouse over the graph. A red dot appears showing the time interval that will be selected if you click your mouse. When you click the graph, a pop-up window appears showing the CPU usage for the top three most CPU-intensive processes at the selected time. Sometimes you may be able to clearly see a correlation between events that have occurred on your PC and the performance impact resulting from those events.

Performance Graph 2/2

Click the ”Memory” tab to view the graph of the system’s memory usage.

As in the CPU graph, the horizontal axis shows the elapsed time since the measurement was taken. The vertical axis shows the percentage of memory used. Similar to the CPU graph, the yellow area shows your Norton product’s memory usage over time; the blue area shows the system’s memory usage. The gray-filled area indicates user idle time.

Example

This example shows how you can use the event and performance graphs.

During the last week, you noticed that your computer is running slower than usual. You have downloaded and installed multiple applications lately so you don’t know which one may be affecting your system’s performance.

Here are a few steps that you can take:

1. On the performance graphs, zoom into the weekly view. You can now view your system’s performance during the last week.
2. Look for any spikes or increase in the CPU and memory usage during this time.
3. On the CPU graph, click the areas that show heavy CPU usage.
4. The process pop-up window appears with the processes that consumed most of the CPU.
5. Click the process. The File Insight window appears.
6. Use File Insight to find the application corresponding to this process, how it got in your system and a graph of its performance impact on your system.