Norton Sucks Ass

[unseenmenace]

Can someone please tell RetroGamer how crap Norton is as he won't believe me

[keili]

OK, some experiences:
- slows down the whole system
- some programs don't work anymore
The first point should be reason enough to put it into the trash .

[cb]

OK, some experiences:
- slows down the whole system
- some programs don't work anymore
The first point should be reason enough to put it into the trash .

Sounds like Windows Vista

[teh3pwner]

i used to have it on my pc but then i gave up on av progs i have no protection on my pc except the vista firewall, and i have no viruses and my pc work like a charm......


so i guess that all anti viruses suck donkey balls

[PaulB]

Only from word of mouth but I've heard that Norton once installed prevents some programs from running when installed or if they were already installed before you installed Norton. Not good. Also apparently if you want to uninstall Norton via the built in uninstaller it just don't get rid of everything. Apparently you have to go to Nortons site and dig through their menus to find a program that they offer that will completely remove all traces from the registry and hard drive. Not something I'd have on my hard drive nowadays. I stick with AVG. http://free.grisoft.com does everything I need.

[unseenmenace]

Actually I'm also not bothering with an AV prog at present but I do have Spybot - Search & Destroy watching my registry for unannounced changes. That said whenever I install an antivirus program for anyone else I also use AVG as its pretty lean by todays standards, does a better than average job of actually detecting viruses and of course is free I'd have AVG on here but the free version won't install on XPx64 (Win2003)

[Mug UK]

When idiot in PC World sold me my laptop last September, he tried to sell me the Norton 12-month offer .. told him I wouldn't have that *thing* anywhere near any of my current machines or the laptop. He looked a little perplexed - but saved him the trouble of ruining his future commission by not telling how bad it really is.

I bought BitDefender (3 machine licence) and that works like a charm on my two XP PC's and my Vista laptop. If AVG was any cheaper at the time, I'd probably have gone with that

Norton is to AV like The Sun is to quality journalism

[aktiv8]

Sorry RG but Norton is the biggest pile of poo ever...

It used to be one of the best - back in the days of DOD and early windows days (well OK v3/3.1/3.11 and even 95) but it is now nothing more than bloated bloatware; a memory and resource hog and more! Remember MS used to use a version of norton Speeddisk as its Defragmenter for DOS...

[rant]
First thing I advise people to do today if they get something from PC World is to NOT take the Norton 360 offer, tell the sales person to bog off (cos if they knew anything they would forego their commision and say something like "pay £15 for NOD32" or use the Free version of AVG). Then to uninstall the horrible 30/60/whatever day trial of norton 360 that tends to be installed on a lot of systems these days and then relax
[/rant]

[PaulB]

If AVG was any cheaper at the time, I'd probably have gone with that

AVG is free. You only have to pay for AVG Pro. The free version comes with no spyware or adware and is updated with the same virus definitions as the pro version. The only difference is that avg pro has more option which in my opinion aren't needed anyway.

Try it again for free http://free.grisoft.com

[simbo]

norton is a usefull tool {or used to be back in the p1 and pre p1 era}
it was handy to repair and flag bad cluters and to perminantly lock out bad sectors

now its useless and a total liability

for vista and defrag i found a tool from here http://www.auslogics.com/disk-defrag

works fine at its job and its costless

for antivirus i use a mailguard to remove unsafe attachments
when im sure ill download it
most of the mail i recieve comes via yahoo

who use you guessed it norton to scan

or notorn as its better known

[keili]

OK, some experiences:
- slows down the whole system
- some programs don't work anymore
The first point should be reason enough to put it into the trash .

Sounds like Windows Vista

LOL, you're right. Although i haven't worked with Vista yet, i heard it many times.

[manicx]

Use it first. My experience with Vista is a good one. Plus, for free A/V, go for Avira's AntiVir Personal. It is by far the lightest and most effective free A/V out there. You only need to apply a little tweaking in Vista to disable some popups. Oh, Norton sucks big time. However, Norton Corporate is fine.

[RetroGamerUK]

Lol, I was gonna start a similar topic, looks like Unseen has saved me the effort.
This follows a discussion we had on MSN on Sunday in which Unseen claimed to have seen a recent survey which concluded that Norton AV was crap and AVG was the dog's.
Now basically I have always used Norton AV / INternet security on all my PCs past and present and while I agree about the system hog thingy (even though I never noticed it on my PCs) I have never experienced any compatibility issues or other problems to note, sure I have downloaded a few trojans over the years and Norton has always got to them before they did any damage and deleted them (until Vista), NIS has always passed all the online firewall tests and AFAIK my system has never been compromised by hackers.

Now I don't think Unseen is an idiot and I know he means well - but his disliking of almost all the most popular of software and hardware have taught me be sceptical of his claims, even though he mends PCs for a living
So at the risk of upsetting him further I did some research of my own using google, and these were the only comprehensive online comparison sites I could find that compare Norton to AVG Pro:
The results are all in different values. some % some marks out of ten etc etc, but the general trend of all the results does indeed contradict the general opinion of Unseen and the other users who have replied here, I could go along with the "eek Norton is crap" sentiment that seems to be based entirely on the fact that it uses more system resources than other AV software, but as I said, I have had no problems with it.
And for the record, I have personally de-infested plenty of PCs with AVG free installed.

So what I am trying to do is separate the shocking facts from the (un)fanboyisms and politics, these are the sites I found:

Website / Result for Norton AV / McAffee / Grisoft AVG Pro / Kaspersky / Bitdefender / Trend / Eset Nod32

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,130869/article.html - 84 / - / 77 / 85 / 84 / 80 / 84
http://www.eset.com/products/compare-NO ... tition.php “Eset” biased site obviously, various tests with Norton beating AVG easily.
http://anti-virus-software-review.toptenreviews.com/ -- 7 / 6 / 8 / 2 / 1 / 4 / 3
http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6600_7-665 ... ml?tag=txt 7.5 / 6.8 / 6 / 8 / 6.8 / - / 7.3
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/shopper/labs/230 ... ducts.html 3 / 3 / 4 / 5 / 3 / 2 / 4
http://www.journal-a-day.com/Computers_ ... -test.html 83% / 93% / 82% / 99% / 96% / 80% / 5%

Of course I don't necessarily believe these sites are anything more than sponsored advertisements, but the trend does seem to contradict the idea that AVG Pro is any good at all not only compared to Norton but also to the other software, of course these sites are just trying to sell software, but AVG Pro is also for sale
In fact, going off those it seems that Kaspersky is the one to go for, it seems to fair well in the comparisons and is not a system hog, and is not "crap" apparently, and bitdefender doesn't look too bad, a credit to Mug and his great big broadsheet newspaper reading smugness
The main thing that struck me is the lack of any "independent" websites that give plausible evidence to support Unseen's claims, all you get is such comments as "norton is crap".
There are many forums covering this topic, and the general opinion seems to be that Norton is crap, poo, a system hog, that is it
So if it is a hog because it does more to actually protect the system then it is runtime well spent in my opinion

So, until I see some real evidence to support that the claims here are more than just personal opinions based on something other than fact then I will continue to use the best selling anti-virus / firewall, actually I may even change to one of the "better" ones (going off real evidence ) as long as I can get a decent firewall as well - we can talk about firewalls in another topic perhaps.
I'm not disputing that norton is crap, but according to the the most plausible of the vast array of dubious data available to me, it would seem that norton is considerably less crap than AVG. so there you go.

P.S. Unseen, two of the trojans I found were exes associated with 2 pieces of software that I know you use, I may have even got one of them from you so you might want to install AV software, will tell you the details on MSN later (if you are still talking).

[aktiv8]

P.S. Unseen, two of the trojans I found were exes associated with 2 pieces of software that I know you use, I may have even got one of them from you so you might want to install AV software, will tell you the details on MSN later (if you are still talking).

Don't forget that a lot of AVs mark packed EXE files as trojan/suspicious and also keygens etc as Trojan/hacktools not to mention a lot of other "false positives" - so always be weary of what is acctually a true trojan and what is not - and common sence here often prevails

If there is any doubt on a file then uload it to http://virusscan.jotti.org/ and get it tested with multiples AVs

In fact I remember McAfee brandishing some of my own code as a trojan - and all it was was a data grapher coded in Delphi... Joys of heuristics I suppose

Anyway it is true that AVs etc are down to personal opinion and everyone will have a tale to tell. What I can say however, is that I go to some really interesting/intirguing/Ok read dodgy sites and murrent set up of firefox, Comodo firewall and AVG is giving me a clean system

I would however agree that the norton corporate editions are much better and less hogging amd actually quite good in that respect.

Furthermore we should all remember that NO AV is 100% for anything and comparitive tests are dpenedent on AV definitions, what you test it with etc and of course the pro-activeness of teh security teams employed in detections and destructions of viruses that are in the wild differ in size and no doubt quality so factoring this in would account for higher ratings for the "bigger" companies, although like RG has said you have to take all comparisions with a pinch of salt - nothing is truly unbiases IMHO

[RetroGamerUK]

Oops, double reply

[RetroGamerUK]

Don't forget that a lot of AVs mark packed EXE files as trojan/suspicious and also keygens etc as Trojan/hacktools not to mention a lot of other "false positives" - so always be weary of what is acctually a true trojan and what is not - and common sence here often prevails

I had wondered about this at the start, but one of the "infected" .exes could not be deleted in Vista either by NAV or manually, despite changing the permissions / ownership etc. is this typical of a trojan / virus or just Vista acting all girly?
So I simply rebooted into XP and manually deleted the file at which point Norton (yes I have it in XP as well) reported it as a "blocked trojan your PC is safe" thingy, which I was rather impressed with

If there is any doubt on a file then uload it to http://virusscan.jotti.org/ and get it tested with multiples AVs

Thats the best advice I have had so far, will make a note of that site

[unseenmenace]

One thing worth mentioning: when I recommend AVG to others (mainly customers where I work) its not on the basis that its necessarily the best at detecting or removing viruses but that its easy to use, unlikely to slow the system down noticeably, highly unlikely to cause any connectivity or compatibility problems and best of all, its free. I have genuinely lost count of the numbers of customers who have had their internet or email cut off by an overzealous firewall (e.g. Norton or McAffee) or had their systems slowed to the point they become completely unresponsive. Just because Norton will do the job on a high end PC used by someone who has half a clue what he's doing (e.g. RG ) does not make it a good program .

[Mug UK]

Before I bought BitDefender, I had fond memories of the older version 9 from a few years back. The main reason for buying it was the reviews (some of those links RG gave looked familiar when I was doing my research) - if anything, BitDefender is a little too gung-ho when it comes across certain files packed with such-and-such cryptor (e.g. game trainers) and it deletes them overnight. And happily tells you it did this as if it wants a "good boy" bone to run off and bury somewhere

I know people who swear by Fprot (still going after all these years) and others who prefer NOD32 - it's whichever one you feel comfortable with I guess. BD gives me anti-spam, firewall and AV in the one package.

[RetroGamerUK]

@Unseen, yeah I wondered if most users against Norton were idiots but it seems not going from the general consensus both here and in other forums, I have heard that when it goes wrong it can take down the system with it, perhaps I have been lucky.

Anyway I have now decided that I like the sound of bitdefender, as the "firewall and AV in one package" is what I have always used, and I don't mind paying for it (AV software that is)....
Well my norton subscription runs out in about 40 days so perhaps I will change to something else then, but if anyone has more advice about any AV / firewall software then I would be interested
Also I would still like to see any more web pages covering test comparisons etc etc

[techie_alison]

I don't run ANY AV software whatsoever!!

My system is Ghosted (that's backed up) and I just merrily go about my way. Now and then I've picked up a few things, pull the network cable out of the back, and reboot the machine with the Ghost DVD in. 20-minutes later!! Voila!! Brand new PC!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, did I mention.... I hate bloody computers! But most of all, I hate the users! Years ago I used to be straight there in knowing everything. Now I just deny everything. ME!? Nooo, I don't know anything about computers!! Do you?

[RetroGamerUK]

my God, nice loft conversion
Even got its own throne room with a telly
Not fair.

[030falcon030]

Seriously why would you bother with anti virus? I would (if I used windows) consider that, paying £200+/- for my O.S. I shouldn't have the need for an anti virus program at all and therefore would refuse to use one.
Can someone please explain the difference between Windows and a computer virus to me as I've heard that microsoft is stealing your personal infomation anyway?

[bullis1]

My internet browser (Arachne) runs under DOS so I don't need to worry about any malicious code making its way onto my machine unless I'm dumb enough to do it manually.

Also, sometimes I browse the web on my Sega Dreamcast, but that's not going to be infected either.

As a final note, using Firefox (while it's not perfect) goes a long way for preventing your machine from being compromised.

[techie_alison]

My internet browser (Arachne) runs under DOS

Hey, my Dad used to run that, on an IBM XT 286. But he's dead. That's not a joke, I'm rather upset about it and quite matter of fact. We haven't switched his computer off yet.

All of this AV hype and the amount of time people spending obsessing over it, hours spent searching on this and running scans. You may as well just Ghost the freshly installed O/S. The amount of junk that people have on their computers is unbelievable. Windoze is bad enough, and then they put even more useless poo on the things. Might as well have a thousand viruses. The biggest virus is the idiot using the damn thing.

When I used to be in Desktop Support, we'd have these people that'd do allsorts to their PCs. Only God knows how they managed it. And a Manager that that wanted us to get to the bottom of everything. fork that!! The amount of hours I spent searching the Internet for pointless problems and fixes!! What he didn't actually realise was that it was quicker to just reinstall the O/S, but was dead against it. I don't care how you fix a 0x213340987u34334 problem. Who cares!!

I honestly do believe you know that they thought it was my fault. The worst thing we ever did was to allow the general population near computers. I've actually given someone a letter before now roughly reading as, "This person is too stupid to own a computer," and sent them off to PC World with it. Actually resulting in a refund. Hooorah!!

[dlfrsilver]

My professional opinion : use Kaspersky. Best one out there hands up.