Norton Rant

[Stead]

off topic a bit, but does anyone else get really frustrated when you use someones comptuer who doesn't really know what theyare on about, who was just bought the newest norten, and defends it to hell and back, using a computer 2 days ago, and i said, when was the last time you reinstalled windows (After waiting 8 minutes to use the desktop i was getting bored) and he replied, never, there is no point, then he was beaming proudly as the norten icon appeared in the systray telling me, i know it slows down the computer, but at least i won't get any virus's now, trying not to laugh at this coment, i suddenly realised that people actually really belive norten is a really good 'internet security suite' and the fact there seemed to be yellow toolbars display various norten stuff everyware was a good thing, has the world gone mad? this version of norten had a nice big button next to the sys tray saying NORTEN in gree with a yellow background, next to the systray icon of norten, then you load up ie a huge toolbar, norten yellow, with big green letters saying FRAUD PROTECTION: ON,i desperatly wanted to turn it off as it was annoying me telling me my computer was beingattacked and it had just stopped another potiential infection, or whatever scare tactics it would randomly pop up (it seems random) to make me fear my own computer, realising i need to subscribe to renew my security each and every passing year.

anyways, after waiting 18 minutes for the computer to be come usable (i'm not exagerating, lthough in all fairness there is a lot of junk on there, but it only took 7 minutes to be usable before) i had to use his wifes laptop (which has avast) took under 2 minutes to start, and i asked, how come you don't use avast? and he told me it doesn't do as good a job as norten, I asked how so, and he pointed out he's never had popup's saying its prevented someone from attacking the computer, and the fact he can't notice the laptop is running avast shows that its inferiour as its clearly not doing anything...

sorry for my rant, but i'm unemployed for a whole month waiting for a new job to start, have way to much spare time, and been hanging around this forum to much!

please feel free to delete this topic!

incidently, from what i can tell, since that computer is being protected by norten, the printer scanner, and skype phone have been moved to the laptop the laptop sits infront of the main pc, ... apparently the main pc is to slow to use now, i'm not sure if its just me, but spending £50 on norten is bad enough, installing it, worse, then just discarding the computer completly because it is now to slow is shocking!

[prx984]

i dont blame you, i have used anti virus software, havent since.

[DigeratiPrime]

I liked to call ZoneAlarm "False Alarm" but it is not alone in this practice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_alarm

Understanding this is the first step in ditching this worthless-ware

[Keris]

This reminds me of one time when my friend's father installed Norton System Works on his machine. This was back in the day of Windows 95 and IE 4. It literally made the computer impossible to use because everything you tried to do took a literal age. Glaciers were whizzing by this machine.

So, one day, me and my friend got fed up with the machine. I think this came when we wanted to check the weather report for the day, an action that should have taken all of five minutes, including waiting for the modem to dial in and establish our 33.6 connection. So without his father's knowledge, we uninstalled it. It, of course, didn't uninstall right. It actually broke the Windows install to the point you could only start in Safe Mode. Not sure what it did to do this, but we just took the opportunity to nuke the crap-filled install and make a faster, clean one.

We did our best to put things back how they were before our adventure (we DID back up all the real data to a spare drive of mine) but left out the ton of crapware that his father had installed. Not so amazingly, the computer acted like the near top of the line computer it was marketed to be after that. Or, rather, it did until his father started installing every piece of junk he ran across again. At least we convinced him to ignore future Norton products. He instead installed the McAfee suit, which is a whole other can of worms ...

As for AV stuff in the present, I rather like Avast. It doesn't fear monger me into dropping a large amount of coin on expensive protection I don't need. It may not be the best on the market for finding and killing bad things, but it's free and is plenty protection for me. It also is very unobtrusive; you can disable all of its routine activity popups, having it only announce its presence when something really is amiss. It also doesn't slow my PC to a crawl, poking it's talons into my system kernel, snooping at every **** byte that goes to and fro.

[jcarle]

I have a router, but I'm DMZed, so it's like not having one. Windows firewall is off. I do not run a firewall, I do not run an anti-virus, I do not run an anti-spyware. I run absolutely none of that junk and never have.

In 8 years, I've had 3 viruses. All 3 which I was able to remove, and all 3 because I was downloading "certain" software.

There is no need for anti-virus software, there is a need for user common sense.

[Jeremy]

I agree on the common sense part. I don't agree on products like Kaspersky or NOD32 being junk. However, good point, nonetheless. I just scan stuff I download and that's it. Internet Security Suites, give me a break...

[nitroshift]

I'm a/v and f/w free. Used to run NOD32 until over a month ago, when I needed all my 1Gb of RAM for some video application. Forgot to reinstall it and when I wanted to scan my pc just reinstalled and updated it and since it found 0 (zero) viruses, I decided to remove it and keep using common sense. Of course, you HAVE to know where you go on the internet and don't click any "OK" you see on the web pages (like my cousin did a while ago and finished up reinstalling the whole system ). If you really need junk on your pc, just google for pr0n

[LLXX]

I don't use any anti-* programs constantly running in the background either. Downloaded files can be scanned with http://virusscan.jotti.org which uses many different AVs. With a secured IE and a user's brain that isn't stupid, nothing has happened to me so far

[jaclaz]

If anyone is interested in more "NORTON RANTS", here is a good place to go:

http://www.computergripes.com/symantec.html

http://www.computergripes.com/nortonantivirus2005.html

jaclaz

[Randy_Rivers]

i agreed on common sense approach and i too find av running in background does slow ya down so now i just run a av portable on my usb stick to do scans now and then. Edited November 10, 2006 by Randy_Rivers

[joshg678]

Haha.

As an employee for the local computer shop, i know how bad norton is. It is really great when people come in with there computer saying norton killed their computer, and it turns out to be a bad hard drive. We usually reccommend install avast because its free, and does a good job. When the client hears free, and good job, they almost do a backflip.

Just the other day, we had a client that was running the freedom package from Adelphia (yea i know, don't even get me started on that POS), the client was complaining that their system was really slow at downloading files, and they were on high speed. We took the system in, cleaned out spyware and a virus or two, and noticed that the freedom package was no longer working (go figure), so we had to uninstall it. Of course windows xp starts to complain that there is no antivirus software installed, which we can no longer reinstall because we are not connected to adelphia, and you have to be to install it.

To test the internet connection we downloaded a 300mb file through our internal lan. We were getting 35kb/sec. This was aful, as usually we can do up to 5.83Mb/sec.

Of course i would assume it could be a network card issue, but i wondered what kind of firewall was on the system at one point. So i searched the registry and found traces of norton. Once i found this, i quickly went to symantec.com/symnrt and ran the removel tool.

After doing this, the computer ran faster, and i was able to pull the 5Mb/sec through our network. Once again, killing norton, fixed the computer.

Edited November 10, 2006 by joshg678

[Tarun]

Haha you did? I was the one that found those traces and did the Norton Removal Tool.

That PC that was beside it that was that crap Dell pc with 256MB RAM and all the users also had Symantec crap leftover on it. You nailed that one.

Heck, there was another time some guy was having all sorts of weird issues, we ran the Norton Removal Tool and everything was fixed.

[joshg678]

yea, we get a tone of those every week.

We both fixed that one, lol.

[jcarle]

... the freedom package was no longer working (go figure), so we had to uninstall it. Of course windows xp starts to complain that there is no antivirus software installed ...

Next time, go to Control Panel -> Security Center, look in the left pane and click on "Change the way Security Center alerts me", remove all three checkmarks and the customer will never be bothered with that again.

Edited November 10, 2006 by jcarle

[oioldman]

ditto with the no av or spyware installed

i do have zonealarm pro and it works fine for me

haven't come across any issue as bad as you guys though, feel rather lucky