Norton is a piece of overrated bloatware imo Slow updates, bad overall detection (I've seen trojans of months old slip through Norton easily), bloated GUI, memory eater etc.... Kaspersky all the way, especially their latest Personal version. Kaspersky used to have messed up GUIs but now they equal Norton's (except the useless stuff and bloat). New virus definitions multiple times a day, good detection, decent memory usage. You can even make it detect adware and other riskware if you'd want to. I like it. Symantec has good marketing and probably by far the biggest user base. All the n00bies know 'Norton' as the only 'virusscanner' so they get it on their box, little do they know.... shame to see a below-average product being used by so many while there are many better alternatives. Even freeware scanners such as AVG are better. Let the flames begin. Edit: I forgot; NOD32 and Avast need a mention too, both of them are great free alternatives to Norton.