I’ve been using Norton stuff since back in the DOS days. It used to be the shit. It had a bunch of useful and efficient utilities and one of the best antivirus programs around. A few years ago it started getting a bit bloated with weird interfaces and less useful stuff, but I didn’t have any of the problems other people started complaining about so I stuck with it. But today finally pissed me off.
I’d been getting notices that I needed to renew my subscription for a while now. I hadn’t gotten around to it, and today I went to tell it to stop bugging me all the damn time, which you used to be able to do. That’s when I discovered the latest bullshit that Symantec has foisted upon the public. It used to be that the subscription was only for access to the Live Update service, for downloading patches and virus definitions and such. Now, though, the subscription is required to even use any part of SystemWorks whatsoever, including turning it off. If you don’t renew, you have a useless bunch of bits clogging up your computer. Therefore, I uninstalled the sonofabitch on the spot. I hear AVG is supposed to be good, and it’s free.
Be warned. Norton doesn’t play nice with the uninstall utility either. There are probably chunks of it still clogging your system’s arteries. Use the Norton Removal Tool to completely get rid of the piece of shit.
I’ve heard it said that Norton products started to suck when Peter Norton no longer had anything to do with them. I can’t verify this, but it seems to fit the timeline of things.
It’s worth noting that Diskeeper is written by the same team that wrote DEFRAG for Windows; it looks like they met the requirements for the DEFRAG contract on Bill’s dime and then spent some R&D money to improve the program. When my partition table was fragmented, Diskeeper was the only utility I found that could defragment it.
No doubt it has become bloated, but there is another aspect that really casues it to be a royal PITA, that of the verification of subscription.
I can understand that Symamtic wants to make sure that everyone who uses their product pays for it. Gone are the days when you could use one disk to install limitless copies of their product, but the way they are going about it is causing more problems, and will continue to push their core (like the OP) away from them.
I have many times had situations where Norton’s subscription service maulfunctioned, not that the AV was corrupted (though I had that too), but something happened that Norton/Symantic thought that the subscription was expired or invalid, even though I had the boxed new product right infront of me and should have plenty of time. IMHO this should NEVER happen to a paying customer, it is akin to calling that person, one who has actually paid for your product, a thief, and every step should be taken to ensure this doesn’t.
I have noticed that Norton seems to require a lot more fixes that require a visit to their web page, following instructions, downloading a program and running that then other AV/security products.
Also the once very useful tools that it once included are either not really needed, or are now part of modern OS’s, so they are forced to come up with other tools but they really didn’t hit on any ‘killer apps’ in that field.
I’m very saddened to see that McAfee ranks higher than Norton. Fucking McAfee. Why, back when I was a youngun, the Cubs would have stood a better chance of winning the World Series than McCrappy had of besting Norton. Hell, in days past I’ve witnessed Norton intercept email viruses that slipped through the sender’s McAfee scanner. It’s a damn shame I tell you, a damn shame.
As for BitDefender, CNET and some other sites rank Kaspersky higher. I’m more inclined to go with Kaspersky but I haven’t decided yet.
Question: The BitDefender version 10 I bought is their base model, which doesn’t include a firewall or spam filter. My ISP does most of the spam filtering before I download email, so that’s no biggie. But should I upgrade for the firewall? I’m on cable modem access and the computer’s on most of the time.
