What’s wrong (in general) with Norton Utilities?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve noticed a lot of animosity towards All Things Norton on these boards. Is it similar to a general anti-Microsoft sentiment? Are there specific reasons? The only thing I’ve ever heard about it is that it’s resource intensive. Do other programs do the same thing, but with a smaller footprint? If there’s no noticeable slowdown (not that 2 GB of RAM is all that much), does having Norton make a difference?

My Symantec subscription is due, hence the OP.

If Norton is not a good thing to have on your machine, what do you use instead?

At the moment, I’ve got a hardware firewall (NAT) in my router to protect from incoming attacks, ZoneAlarm pro to protect/monitor outgoing communications, I run occasional Adaware and Spybot searches, and Norton runs nightly anti-virus and daily One-Button-Checkups.

I have Norton for three reasons: First, anti-virus; second, worm and other intrusion protection; and third, system maintenance.

For anti-virus, the name I’ve heard most often is AVG. Is it as robust and updated as Norton? Security as tight? Any other anti-virus recommendations?

Would upgrading to AVG Internet Security duplicate all of Norton’s protections from worms and whatnot? What about allowing all ZA Pro options? Would doing so result in similar resource use?

Lastly, what about system maintenance? Granted, I have no idea what One-Button-Checkup has really been doing all this time, but it’s got to do something… right? Right? Is it worth replacing with something else? Didn’t Win98 come with Regclean or some such utility? Should some magical mystery registry cleaner/system maintainer be run on a regular basis?

In short, if Norton isn’t worth it resource-wise, what suite replaces it, and what isn’t necessary?

Thanks,

Rhythm

2

Maybe Norton’s software works just fine, but you’ll start to hate it when you want to replace it with something else. It just won’t uninstal.

This is prolly the source of the aversion against Norton.

(I use AVG on 3 different systems, I’m behind a hardware firewall and do my ‘maintenance’ manually)

3

The main complaint that I’ve heard is that the software often causes more problems than it solves, a risk with any software that mucks around with the innards of the operating system.

4

AVG is excellent and updated most days. Some find that it slows their sytems down but I never noticed anything untoward. As regards robustness, couldn’t say as the only thing I ever do with Norton is remove it.

Avast, which I now use in preference to AVG. (On Windows machines of course) Updated twice a day mostly.

Personally I do this manually, haven’t much faith in registry cleaners but the tools in Spybot Search & Destroy do help quite a bit.

Also Superantispyware and Sygate Firewall (ironically a Symantec owned business now).

Whenever I have encountered Norton/Symantec they have been a disaster and the systems in question have improved significantly after having them removed and replaced with Spybot Search & Destroy , AdAware, Avast, Sygate and Superantispyware.

Obligatory plug: Or install Ubuntu and forget about all that shit!

5

Go to the Norton website and run their uninstaller, it is the only way to get rid of it all on any system and the only way to get rid of it AT ALL on some.

6

Norton is almost impossible to remove. It is so inbeded into the OS. I personally think AVG is the best. it is a very light program, updates daily and is free. You should have have to go download a special uninstall app from symantec. The very fact they have one means you should not use there program.

7

So you agree it’s a pain to uninstall?

8

For the reasons posted above, Norton sucks. It would slow my system to a crawl. I use AVG and it works flawlessly and quietly. I tried Avast, but it seemed to slow my system down noticeably (but not terribly). I have a number of redundant utilities installed. Spy-Bot and Ad-Aware are on my system as well as my new favorite Threatfire keep my system clean.

9

Opinion bit: It seems to me that as modern computers have become more reliable, Norton’s function has increasingly shifted from actually maintaining your computer to inserting itself 'twixt operator and OS and maintaining a barrage of notices informing the user of how vitally important Norton is. It’s hard to think of a single function it performs that isn’t done manifestly better by something else, usually for free, and if said function is even necessary at all.

Zone Alarm Pro is a perfectly good firewall, and it’s hard to see the point of having separate programs monitor incoming and outgoing connections; that’s all Norton’s “worm protection” is, an inbound firewall. All you’re achieving by having both running is using up system resources, and should you ever actually want to have a program that accepts inbound connections, you’ve got to poke holes in two separate firewalls. While I haven’t used Norton’s worm protection, a quick look suggests it’s much less configurable than ZAP, and less functional to boot.

For AV there are undoubtedly free alternatives that are at least the equal of Norton. AVG’s free version is perfectly serviceable, and just as functional while consuming fewer resources. You only get nagged about buying the thing at major releases, which are spaced far enough apart that this is little bother at all.

System maintenance is the big hoax, as far as I’m concerned. The “one button checkup” appears to take a cursory scan of the registry for “inconsistencies”, does a bit of disk monitoring, checks for missing desktop shortcuts (how useful!) and, um, deletes your temporary internet files. The latter two are so trivial it’s almost insulting, and there simply is no reason to run the former daily, or even weekly. I can see running a hard drive diagnostic every so often (monthly at most), but I can’t really see the value in having something poking at your registry on a daily basis. To my mind, the registry is something to be ventured in to when something has gone observably wrong; it’s difficult to see what a daily automated check is going to achieve other than to stuff things up.

It seems to me that if you downloaded AVG and uninstalled Norton (offering a prayer to the PC gods as you did so), you’d have every bit as much protection and functionality as you did before, and a faster PC to boot. A disclaimer, though: I haven’t touched Norton in 5 years having watched it completely and utterly destroy someone’s PC (full reinstall of Windows needed). It may be 5 years better by now, but I severely doubt it.

10

Unreservedly.

11

It’s often easier and less time-intensive to go out and buy a new hard drive and re-install everything than to try removing all of Norton’s tentacles from a PC.

OK, so I exaggerate. But only just a tiny bit. Even if you run Symantec’s uninstaller app, my experinece is it still leaves behind useless deadweight in the registry.

12

In addition to what dead badger and others have said, if your router does your firewalling, and you don’t open questionable email attachments and generally keep your wits about you on the internet, ALL of Norton’s services are a waste. Maybe I subconsciously do my own system maintenance, I’m not sure. But I’ve been running my current windows XP installation for 2 years, and another for twice that long, with heavy internet use (to include the usual pirate/bootleg stuff typical of someone my age), with no virus protection or software firewall. I make a reasonable effort to keep windows up to date, and my $40 router has a good drop-unless-I-explicitely-say-so firewall, and I’ve had 0 issues. I use have Norton on my work computer, which is much newer and more powerful than any of my home computers, and it feels much slower. So I hate it for those reasons.

Plus it’s a pain to uninstall.

13

If you uninstall it when the machine is brand new, you stand a chance of removing it fairly cleanly.

I’ll echo the sentiments above - Norton/Symantec AV/security software is (in my experience) intrusive, restrictive, system-hogging and unstable. On a couple of occasions, I’ve had machines handed to me with comment to the effect “See what you can do with it, but it’s running so slowly and it keeps crashing - I think I just need to upgrade” - and all that was wrong was that Norton was hogging all the resources and bringing the system to its knees - uninstalling it and replacing with something a bit lighter improved the performance quite strikingly.

I’ve heard some IT bods in large corporate situations speak favourably of it though, but I’m not sure I could ever be persuaded to trust it again. Norton had a fantastic reputation in the old days when it was THE antivirus program, and Norton also produced a range of kick-ass tools for DOS that made Microsoft look like amateurs for not thinking of them - but the Norton of today isn’t even the same company, and doesn’t derive anything but the reputation (which it no longer actually earns) to the Norton of the Good Old Days.

14

Two vitally important points:
[ul]
[li]A NAT is not a firewall. It is a NAT. It provides no real security.[/li][li]ZoneAlarm is stupid. Uninstall it. There is no way it can actually provide anything more than a false sense of security. Once the burglar is in your house, do you care if he can call his best friends on your phone? Do you really think the lock on your phone is going to seriously deter him anyway, given that he used a full lockpicking kit to get in?[/li][/ul]

15

Interesting. This essentially contradicts much that I have read before. Can you expand?

I thought that an NAT did provide some security, regardless of whether it is a firewall properly so called. I thought Zonealarm was useful because if you are alerted to a burglar ringing from inside your house, you know he’s there. I’ve certainly had ZoneAlarm do so.

16

A NAT doesn’t drop any packets, it simply translates addresses. Firewalls have to drop packets to secure anything. Some NATs also provide firewall functionality, which can confuse the issue, but then it isn’t just a NAT anymore, is it?

How do you know all of them tripped ZoneAlarm? How do you know most of them did? Given that all processes can be killed or fooled from inside the machine, you have no idea. “A false sense of security” is precisely what ZoneAlarm and software firewalls in general provide.

Worse, they tend to be aimed at people who don’t know anything about networking but get really excited when someone pings them. A ping is not a security threat, but the software firewall reports it and so it must be a serious problem.

17

In the ten years or so I’ve been a heavy internet user I’ve had one virus and one worm or whatever you might call it that called home. I found out about the former due to its obvious obnoxious behaviour, and the latter due to ZoneAlarm. Sweeps of my computers using the usual tools every now and again have never found anything, ever.

Saying something is stupid and that it provides nothing more than a false sense of security just because it isn’t bulletproof seems hyperbolic, to say the least.

18

Doesn’t NAT drop packets? It does not pass data through unless the lan side has setup a connection with a computer on the other side. What does the nat router do with all the pings etc that are address to its WAN side IP address?

19

Satisfied Norton customer here. I’ve been using Norton products for at least 20 years, since long before the Symantec days. I’ve had none of the nightmares reported in this or other anti-Norton threads.

I currently have SystemWorks installed on two home desktops and a notebook. I use AntiVirus (including ad blocking), Personal Firewall, WinDoctor (resgistry scanner), SpeedDisk (defragger), and Anti-Spam. Antivirus is set to automatically download the latest updates and scan every week. I periodically defrag my hard disks and occasionally run DiskDoctor.

I do not use System Doctor (the monitoring program), Cleanup, GoBack, or Ghost, so I can’t comment on them.

I am basically satisfied with the performance and protection I’ve gotten from Norton over the years. I have uninstalled the programs from systems on several occasions with no problems. I run a one-man business from home, so security of my business data is absolutely critical. Norton has kept me completely virus- and intruder-free for the ten years that I’ve been on my own.

I will grant that it uses resources, but not unreasonably so on my relatively old (3-4 years) and somewhat underpowered XP Pro system. I don’t use the system monitor, which I think would create an unnecessary burden.

I’ve always installed Norton on clean systems, usually right after finishing the OS install. I can well believe that on a poorly maintained system, or on a system that was in bad shape when Norton was installed, getting it to work right or trying to remove it might be a real PITA.

I am not saying that the people who’ve had problems with Norton are making things up or wrong or crazy, just that their experiences don’t jibe with mine. And I suspect that if their experiences were common, Norton wouldn’t be the leading anti-virus and utility program out there. Is it bloated, can it cause problems, are there free programs that can do some of what it can do? Yes, yes. and yes. But in my experience it has worked consistently and effectively at a price I find reasonable.

20

Many routers can be configured to pass unsolicited incoming packets to a default IP address. This lets you do things like running servers on a system behind a NAT.