I have never. Ever. Had a virus on my computer that has caused anywhere near the sorts of problems and frustrations that Norton Anti-Virus causes. It’s by far the buggiest piece of software on any computer I come across (and no, not on mine: I’d never install the POS, but it’s on every work or family computer I come across), takes up more memory than virtually any other normal desktop program and as of late, has developed a whole suite of features that make it a giant pain in the ass.
For instance, in what I can only assume is an attempt to prevent particular virulent viruses from shutting it down or disabling it, they’ve made it near impossible to shut down or disable. Which is absolutely PERFECT when it inevitably crashes, stalls out, or blocks some other actually useful program from functioning properly and then crashes when I try to fix the problem. Now I’m stuck with an unshutdownable blob of buggy nonsense sucking up memory and making the whole system unstable.
Seriously: as long as one doesn’t use an equally stupid email client (like Outlook) or do other dumb things that earn you a virus or open you up to security flaws, I can’t imagine that the good Norton supposedly does outweighs the pure headache and instability it causes, not to mention the huge drain on system resources. This company needs to die almost as much as Hurlit-Packard, another hardware/software company that must have a company requirement that all employees consume lead paint chips. How can a simple printer that would function flawlessly with simple plug and play require five different constantly running processes, taskbar tools, and other nonsense? Who greenlights all this idiotic bullshit?
The Norton Suite of three years ago used to crash my home built PC. Norton 2004 slows my Win XP down so much that I can’t use other apps at the same time. We have McAfee at work. Norton came out with an important virus def the day before McAfee did, so I’d rate Norton best on that. As many guys as are out to get us, I figure I need antivirus of some sort at home and Norton was free.
If you can manage to install HP with only the driver, go for it. I did an HP 6122 Friday with the Windows install and pointed it at the CD for the driver with “have disk.”
Some “business drivers” are available on the web, but I’ve not had time to investigate throughly. This automatically checking the web for updates-and crashing if the user isn’t an admin-sucks big time. I uninstall that app, but it’s annoying as hell.
The Norton 2006 Security System doesn’t seem to cotton too well to AOL’s system (McAfee, I believe) either, at least not with the 9.0 Optimized SE version. I’ve had connectivity issues like you wouldn’t believe–strike that, you’d believe it. Even when I turned off the damn firewall, I still couldn’t connect. So…a night and part of a day later, after an hour on the phone with two tech support folks and the urge to call Geek Squad, I’m finally back on, but I’m running an earlier version of AOL.
No offense, but AOL sucks in such a big way-installing it’s own winsock and killing network connectivity in one version-that I don’t think that’s a fair comparison.
I dumped Norton awhile back, installed McAfee, got a couple of Trojan things despite regular updates and scans (McAfee didn’t detect the Trojans), and now I’m running AVG. I’m amazed at how much faster and easier everything’s working. Knock wood.
I had that crap. It came with the computer, and after I got one of their updates, I found I couldn’t turn off my computer without having to risk damaging my computer by pushing the power button and holding it.
Sounds like I’m not alone. But how do they get away with a program that does pretty much just as much bad stuff to your computer as the things its supposed to be protecting us from?
Norton is semi-decent, but very very far from perfect. It’s an outrageous resource hog, and throws more hooks into your system than you can shake a stick at. It’s pretty damn near impossible to remove all traces of their suite if the uninstaller fails (even with their manual uninstall tools).
Despite that, it’s still INIFINETELY better than McAfee, which is beyond worthless. That company can’t die fast enough.
I recommend AVG exclusively to my clients, which can be obtained free for personal use from http://free.grisoft.com . For business use on a single machine, I believe it’s $30 for two years. For the SoHo edition, it’s $115 for 5 clients for 2 years. Can’t beat that…
AVG scans slower than most clients and still needs some work on the UI side (especially for their firewall client), but it’s stable as hell and runs smoothly on the crummiest of PCs.
I had norton once. I attempted to remove it. It, apparently, did not like being removed and corrupted my system. I had to format my drive.
Now, I have no virus software. I have linux.
I’ve never payed for an anti-virus program and I never will; I’ve known too many people who have problems with their computer after installing them. I use Microsoft Anti-Spyware in conjunction with the free version of F-Protect.
