The Norton rep came into work the other week and said that, while it had been a horrific resource hog in the past, Norton have improved it dramatically and it’s now a far lighter load on the system. Of course, he is the Norton rep, a position I wouldn’t expect him to maintain for long if he didn’t manage to sell the product.
I haven’t tried the “New and Improved” version of Norton. I’m running AVG on my system at the moment because I was too cheap to pay to renew Norton last year.
Wow, I had no idea Norton products were regarded as dogs. Could Norton firewall and antivirus be contributing to how my computer bogs down during intense video game moments?
Yes and no. I do hold some animosity towards them for buying out Central Point and killing off what I thought was a better software suite sold as MacTools and PCTools.
But their bad reputation is also well-earned on both platforms, mostly in times far more recent than that.
I’ll leave it to the Windows users to chime in about the behavior of NU and NAV on their platform. On the Mac, Norton Utilities was more destructive than helpful in all of its OS X incarnations. (It actually had a good reputation prior to that, with Norton Utils for OS 9 being fairly highly regarded). Competing products showed up, wiped the floor with Norton, and the product simply disappeared from the lineup on the Mac side. For commercial disk-utility programs, Mac folk use DiskWarrior primarily, with TechTool Pro a distant second. Norton’s as gone as WordPerfect.
That left antivirus. Norton promotes Mac antivirus. Antivirus sw on the Mac is a bit like having a Space Aliens Strategic Defense Initiative: there are none as of yet to defend against, and there’s naught but blind faith to make one think that the measures taken would be useful against these hypotheticals if they were to become real tomorrow. In that light, anything NAV did on the Mac short of quietly doing apparently nothing was likely to irritate, and it did in fact make many applications, disk access, and network connections unstable and sluggish.
My experiences over a decade aree also that yes, Symantec Norton burdens your system resources heavily. It will tend to slow the system way down while it does its own thing in the background, so it can get really aggravating to try and get things done. But at least it’s not McAffee :eek: That was a bad experience.
Still it has performed to me as a solid AV/Worm product, nothing to write home about but does its job and is within the normal price range for such software. Suits keep buying it for the corporate systems and for bundleware(*) because, as they used to say about IBM, nobody gets fired for awarding the contract to Symantec/Norton.
(*)BTW, I’d wager a symbolic sum that a lot of the current user base is made up of those who received it as trialware in their computer right out of the box, set to activate itself upon the initial system setup sequence and who “agreed” to right there (because, hey, I can’t be unprotected even ten seconds) and later they either don’t bother or give up on trying to change it.
So in view of that I take Norton AV seriously when looking for AV, but I long ago gave up ton the descendants of Norton Utilities. Even under W98 SystemWorks it duplicated a heap of what MS and lighter, cheaper 3rd-parties (e.g. BCWipe) already did for me . In the days of DOS5/Windows3 Norton Utes was the cat’s pajamas… but, But as mentioned before in this thread, the system utilities part of Norton have tended with time to become moot, since the unsophisticated casual user will use whatever maintenance tools come with a current-issue OS, and for the more sophisticated user there are alternatives out there.
Yes they can be, depends on how much power you need.
My .02 cents worth, norton is excessively intrusive and a resource hog. It locks doors that should not be locked in my opinion and does not bother to say anything when it blocks something. If NIS simply threw a popup saying, “we have detected an attempt to access a shared network resource “X” would you like to grant access,” I would be alot more forgiving of their other faults. I have solved far more problems by removing norton products than they will ever solve on their own.
In addition I have systems misbehaving badly, goback installed, failed every time to restore the system after Norton GoBack ran. Removed GoBack and the system would no longer boot. Sadly the customer freaked out and now thinks Norton was the only thing keeping his system alive and I had broken it, refused to hear anything else and demanded I leave before I could try so much as a quick repair installl of XP or a bootcfg from recovery console.
That said, some of their corporate and large server solutions are far more effective and useful tools than the home user versions.
Sales reps are sales reps. A dramatic improvement in Norton would make it the second worst app in the industry (behind the previous version). My opinion of course, but that’s my experience. Ever since I’ve been running my free apps, I’ve had no problems. I’ve had AVG catch EVERY virus I have downloaded before I execute any file (I’m on…um…all kinds of download sites). I’ve noticed that since I installed Threatfire, my Spybot and Adaware scans have picked up a lot fewer things. Either way, I still stand behind the army against Symantec.
I’ve had bad experiences with it because I was a tech at a small software shop, and over the years saw a lot of permutations that broke NAV (or vice versa) in certain ways. But you’re right, for the average home user, you can use it for a long time, be happy with the way your computer runs, and be happy with the product. That, along with aggressive marketing and aggressive use of bundling with new computers, is why it’s so successful. But I liken it to a bear-repellent backpack that I can sell you for $200. The backpack is nothing but a 10 pound sack of rocks, but you can wear it around for 10 years and be reasonably happy with its performance (no bear attacks, it must be working!) and figure the $200 and the inconvenience of lugging around 10 pounds everywhere is worth the benefit. I would argue that since you never used your computer without Norton, you don’t know how much performance you’re missing, and if you had never used it, I don’t think you’d have any problems anyway as long as you’re sensible and use a cheap router with a firewall. You might think all those drawbacks are worth the peace of mind, but even the best anti-virus software will fall victim to a proper 0-day attack, so don’t get lulled into a false sense of security… you still need a hardware firewall and some internet-caution.
I used to work as a software engineer for the largest data recovery company in the United States. People would pay the company dearly to have data recovered from damaged hard drives, tapes, CDs, DVDs, etc. Now, my job was reverse-engineering proprietary and obsolete tape formats, but I spoke regularly with the hard drive data recovery guys, and they always complained bitterly about the Norton tools. They said it was commonplace for a customer to try Norton tools on a failing or failed hard drive, and the program inevitably made the situation worse, often to the point of making the data irretrievable. The recovery team did their best to salvage the data and told the customer never to use Norton again.
I use Avira Antvir I love the product. It is free and all you pay is a pop up once a day. One click and it is gone. Just a little simple honest advertising for their extended products. Plus the scanner is called Luke Filewalker how cool is that? Updates and scans daily at a time you can easily set. I feel it uses less resources than AVG and works as well or better. I also think it looks nicer. There is also a right click scan. So if someone “shared” a file with you on the net, just right click on it and selectively scan it. A wonderful tool. Always scan “shared” files before use.
I also use Spybot S&D (I DL the beta updates)and occasionally run AdAware also just to double check.
For general cleaning of files, registry issues and such I use CC cleaner. I really like it and it has so far been the only program I truest to clean and invade my system in that manner. Never a problem although I do not suggest tit for novices, unless you pay close attention.
I use R-Studio for data recovery.
These are all free except for R-Studio.
I spend much of my time on the net. I “Share” files all the time I goto nefarious sites and I never have a problem. My system runs fast and smooth.
And to chime in with the rest on of the first thing I do when fixing a friends computer is take off Mcaffy and or Norton. It speed up and fixed countess problems and saves the the fees.
It’s a heavy drain on system resources. Especially all the monitoring programs it wants to install and set to run continuously by default. The load that those Norton programs impose is not worthwhile in the opinion of many experts.
The Norton tools seem to be less and less effective. This may be a result of the increasing complexity of the Operating System, but much of what Norton does seems to be hardly necessary any more.
As part of Symantic, Norton seems to act more and more like a parasite rather than a provider. Many of their actions seem more typical of scammers than legitimate suppliers. For example:
very aggressive marketing, especially through ‘trial’ versions, which work hard to get you to sign up.
making the product very hard to uninstall. Even after years of hearing this complaint, the problem continues. Uninstalling often leaves the system non-functional, as Norton does not re-connect things it disconnected when installed.
automatically billing your credit card for another year shortly before your current subscription expires. In recent versions of Norton, you agreed to this (via a clause deep in the click-thru license agreement). Preventing this is difficult – you have to notify them that you don’t want to renew your subscription, in advance of the automatic renewal. And if you don’t do it in advance (because you didn’t know it was going to do so automatically), too bad, you already agreed to this.
increasingly frequent complaints that even when told to stop billing your credit card account, Norton continues to do so. People often compare this to trying to shut of AOL credit card charges.
(Note that this was NOT true of Norton products years ago, when they originally gained a good reputation. Those early Norton products were lean, efficient tools, and Peter Norton was very responsive if you had problems using his tools.)
Frankly, even leaving aside practical issues, I find Norton’s marketing efforts so invasive, presumptuous and obnoxious in style it would have to be a virtual super product for me not to want to get rid of it on principle, regardless.
I bought a new laptop recently and spent an entire evening removing Norton. Even when you go through all their uninstallation hoops, they blithely inform you (as if they are doing you some great favour, and are desperately worried for your personal wellbeing, and sincerly concerned at the enormous peril in which you placing yourself by being so foolhardy as to not want to use their product) that they will, luckily for you, leave on your system a reminder/installer program, so that when you come to your senses and realise how close you’ve come committing PC suicide you can easily rush back into the fold by clicking on their helpful little popup so as to get you back into safe harbour, courtesy of them.
To which my answer was: no you fucking will not, you pernicious assholes. Which meant I then had to spend yet more time googling about to find out how to get their “helpful” little turd of a program off my system, which they don’t make easy, natch.
Again the timeliness of the Dope is astounding, as I was going to start a thread about my options for firewall/anti-virus.
I’m with commasense. I’m using Norton Internet Security (firewall and anti-virus) and have had nary a problem (and I’m on 2P2 almost all the time). Does my system run slower? Unknown, as I have never been w/out it. But I play Bioshock, Fear, Half-Life 2, etc on the highest resolution and have never had a slow down.
As to the bolded part of the quote above:
I received an e-mail from Norton about 2 weeks ago informing me my CC was going to auto renew my subscription in 2 weeks. It gave me the web link to go to if I wanted to turn off auto renew. It told me the date I had to do it by so my CC wouldn’t get billed. Not very difficult at all.
I have mixed feeling about Norton. I’m an unsavvy user and have just gone along with Norton anit-virus for years (a decade maybe?) I’ve never had any trouble with viruses or spyware that I know of so, in general it seems to be doing its job. But …
Norton seems to think it owns my machine. It will take over the screen, closing down games I am in the middle of, to let me know “updates complete!”. It is a hog too. There are 4-5 processes running in the back ground at any given time that are part of the AV.
On the other hand … when my son came home from college, he had been running his PC for 4 years with NO AV protection of any kind. He did a lot of “file sharing” in those days and his PC had reached the point where there were so many viruses and spyware processes running that it took minutes to even open a window. I installed the current Norton AV and let that baby scan and fix for 3 days and at the end his machine was pretty damn clean. Maybe there is better software but that did the trick and that’s all I ask.
Where did you get this? I’m running NIS 2007 on one home computer. There is no way that it could auto bill one of my credit cards, since one was never asked for. Obviously that means prevention wasn’t difficult at all. My NIS 2007 did recently expire. It still works, it’s just not getting new updates. About the only annoying thing is the nag screens at two week intervals asking me to resubscribe. I shouldn’t have to click on nag screens for software that I purchased.
I will also say that the computer is sluggish for the first minute or two after boot up due to NIS’s various checks for updates and what not.
Coincidentally, here is a part of today’s financial column by Andrew Tobias, financial writer, and author of the DOS-days Managing Your Money software.