In praise of Norton Antivirus

[andrewducker]

I know that this goes against accepted wisdom, but the latest version of Norton Antivirus is _great_.

They've had a lot of stick in the past for it being horribly slow, leaving crustiness all over the place, being unreliable and a memory hog.  And I've always avoided them because of it.

And then I read an article (I think in PC Pro) which said that they'd finally realised how bad their image was, cleaned the whole thing up, and produced something that was fast, non-intrusive, and cleaned up after itself.

So I tried it out on my machine - and suddenly files were opening significantly faster than they had when I was running AVG.  And then I installed it on Julie's machine - and it was loading levels on The Sims 2 in about 20 seconds rather than 2/3 minutes.

I managed to find a couple of cheap deals that got me 3 licenses for $50 - which meant that it worked out about £10 per PC.  Well worth it.

Comments

[bracknellexile.livejournal.com]

What's the version number - just so I can badger work to upgrading if necessary as I'm lumbered with Norton/Symantec on the laptop.

[princealbert.livejournal.com]

Ah Norton the one thing poisonduk and I never agree on. She runs Norton 360 on all her Windows boxes, where I use Avast without problem. One virus last year which Jackie will bring up but it was caught by Avast and removed without further tools.

Meanwhile I've seen her Norton disable itself a few times in the space of two months on newly built machines, and I'm still very suspicious of its role in the slow death of her old laptop.

I await our Norton based domestic on your LJ, you may want to back it up.

[andrewducker]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norton_AntiVirus#Version_2009_.2816.0.29

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't use older versions of Norton. So no disagreement there :->

[e-halmac.livejournal.com]

Oooh! Yay! I was about to give up on Norton and go to AVG, but will stick with it. And upgrade.

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

I've used Avast for the past few years, as has Steven - no viruses. But I'm not that prone, I don't think. It does seem to make the machine slow to start up as it goes to the web for the latest virus databse, but I can live with that.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

You're joking.

...what O/S are you using at present?

[andrewducker]

Why am I joking?

This is on Vista SP1 and XP SP2.

[theferrett.livejournal.com]

Really.

Who knew?

[andrewducker]

I know!

Thank goodness for demo versions - because I was disbelieving myself when I first read about it, and I certainly wasn't going to pay for it without trying it out.

[poisonduk.livejournal.com]

I USE THE LATEST VERSION of Norton 360. And I buy the latest version every year - normally paying £29.99 for a 3 licence pack if I shop around. Norton lets you get the latest version when it's released, so for example if I had bought 2008 and only installed it in December, my licence is for one year of updates, so it will automatically allow me to download 2009 and get my updates on that version. I turned to 360 this year when I was shopping for Norton 2008 and discovered that I could get a 360 licence for the same price and it manages all my backups too - it can backup to my own HDD(including external) or online storage as it's configured by the user. don't care what Roy says, I've spent hundreds over the years on Norton and never had problems with them. the self disable issue I'm not convinced about and think it was a glitch but he thinks he knows best! One virus in one more than I've ever had so nah nah nah nah-nah.

[drjon.livejournal.com]

Praising Norton Antivirus. Making bold claims as to its alleged new unsuckedetude.

Plus, after over ten years of trying to convince my Uncle that Norton blew goats and was one of the main reasons why his machines always crusted up so fast regardless of how much RAM he kept buying, he's finally let his subscription lapse and let me install avast! and zonealarm in its place.

[andrewducker]

I've used Avast - seemed to work ok, but the interface was a little old-fashioned. You couldn't pay me to use ZoneAlarm.

Old versions of Norton were, indeed, awful.

[dreema.livejournal.com]

we've used symantec/norton AV in clacks schools since we formed the team 6 years ago. This last year we switched to using avira. It's not as pretty, but it catches more stuff and is i think half the price for the number of machines we have.

Be interested to see what this new norton is like. Saying that, I didn't take my schools above version 9, all the later ones seemed to add too much bloat.

[kurosau.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that has anything to do with Norton corporate. I loved using their corp versions at work, because it was fast, efficient, and unobtrusive, didn't slow down the machines at all. I may consider giving norton a try based on you recommendation, but it still likely won't fix their 'trying to create a market by scaring people' tactics anyway.

[soon_lee]

Have used AVG, currently using (and happy with ) Avast. It would take *extreme* circumstances for me to give Norton another try.

My experience with Norton included it causing BSOD on a new Windows PC. Was beginning to doubt my own sanity; it took a while to work out that NortonAV was the offending software.