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Norton Internet Security


jftuga

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Seriously, I use to like Norton, ever since Norton Internet Security 2003 came out their products went downhill. I don't understand why Norton uses up so many resources for no apparent reason. If so many people criticized about its performance and RAM usage, why doesn't Symantec make changes? Thank god I uninstalled Norton's products, they are all garbage. The worse product I've used was Norton Ghost 9.0, too slow, POS didn't even work properly.

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Is it garbage? No, it's much WORSE than that. Saying it's garbage is too much of an understatement, so doesn't describe it accurately enough. I cannot find a word strong enough to express how bad it truly is.

Lots of us could go on very long rants about it: how it sucks, how it makes a PC slower than a dead snail hibernating, how buggy norton stuff is (we've had sooooo much trouble caused by SAV!), how it consistently keeps getting slower and more bloated every year, how the registration process is getting increasingly and unnecessarily troublesome (very long serials, online activation, etc), how dumbed down it is, how sub-par the firewall and AV are (and how much better even free apps often are), how easily it gets "pwned" ("start keylogger" anyone? or using WMI in a vbscript to disable the services, etc), how their support (even paid support) sucks, how intrusive it is, how hard it is to uninstall it (there's an app just for that!) and how it usually breaks things, how much of a waste of money it is (definitions/renewals cost money too - not just initial purchase), etc.

I would rate it a solid 0 out of 10, and that's already being generous.

Their days of making useful apps are long gone (like the original norton utilities). Some of the older versions of some apps are still somewhat useful (e.g. ghost 8.2) but are usually surpassed by the alternatives (i.e. acronis trueimage). I'm sure they'll manage to make all their new acquisitions (like veritas' products) suck beyond belief too - it's just a matter of time.

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Who can't agree that Norton sucks? *Looks around suspiciously* :ph34r:

You don't scare me :)

Personally I have given up on Norton since I could not install a perfectly legal version on a friends PC no matter what I did. Symantec support could not solve it either! Never seen anything like that.

But I must admit that on my work (6000+ PC's) the corporate version is working fine. Or is that version so different that I am comparing different things?

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Or is that version so different that I am comparing different things?

Yes, it is different enough that you're comparing different things. Norton AV (and NIS) makes a PC slow - that's its main problem. SAV on the other hand doesn't make it as slow (it's still quite slow, but beating NIS at this is basically impossible), but is by FAR the most unstable/crashiest AV we've EVER seen. It messed up countless MS Office installs (their "workaround" in their knowledge base thingy was esentially "reinstall"! like going around hundreds or thousands of PCs in many buildings in many sites to manually reinstall is normal?), doscan.exe eating 100% CPU for a while and then crashing (and associated errors/problems, like memory leaks in rtvscan.exe) which happenned basically on every PC we've tried it onto (existing PCs that never had problems, clean installs, you name it), etc. It was the biggest test deployment failure I've ever seen hands down. Too much stuff broken too often, requiring too much work to fix it, increasing the help desk's calls by a fair amount on its own. A real nightmare. Issues like we've never seen using any other AV product. After deploying a dozen or so patches to our test machines (patches which were aimed at fixing those same bugs, from what the release notes said), most of the issues still didn't go away. Turns out we didn't finally deploy it - too problematic/unreliable. No software company has an excuse to ship such crashy junk without any basic QA work. It should have been fairly obvious this junk is broken, and never been released before the main bugs are fixed - there's just NO excuse. This wasn't even beta testing quality.

Between NAV and SAV, I just might pick NAV! (That's a bit like preferring a broken arm to a broken leg though, you still don't want either!) Yes, it'll make your PC so slow you won't be able to do anything with it, but SAV is almost as bad, and it'll also make it crash and it'll break apps and stuff - no thanks!

Edited by crahak
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It is so nice when we can all come together and agree on something :thumbup

Yeah, let's all leave in peace and harmony. TBH, yesterday, while I was playing ONS at Primeval, I said that we all should put down the weapons and dance, but nobody listened to me :no:

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Or is that version so different that I am comparing different things?

Yes, it is different enough that you're comparing different things. Norton AV (and NIS) makes a PC slow - that's its main problem. SAV on the other hand doesn't make it as slow (it's still quite slow, but beating NIS at this is basically impossible), but is by FAR the most unstable/crashiest AV we've EVER seen. It messed up countless MS Office installs (their "workaround" in their knowledge base thingy was esentially "reinstall"! like going around hundreds or thousands of PCs in many buildings in many sites to manually reinstall is normal?), doscan.exe eating 100% CPU for a while and then crashing (and associated errors/problems, like memory leaks in rtvscan.exe) which happenned basically on every PC we've tried it onto (existing PCs that never had problems, clean installs, you name it), etc. It was the biggest test deployment failure I've ever seen hands down. Too much stuff broken too often, requiring too much work to fix it, increasing the help desk's calls by a fair amount on its own. A real nightmare. Issues like we've never seen using any other AV product. After deploying a dozen or so patches to our test machines (patches which were aimed at fixing those same bugs, from what the release notes said), most of the issues still didn't go away. Turns out we didn't finally deploy it - too problematic/unreliable. No software company has an excuse to ship such crashy junk without any basic QA work. It should have been fairly obvious this junk is broken, and never been released before the main bugs are fixed - there's just NO excuse. This wasn't even beta testing quality.

Between NAV and SAV, I just might pick NAV! (That's a bit like preferring a broken arm to a broken leg though, you still don't want either!) Yes, it'll make your PC so slow you won't be able to do anything with it, but SAV is almost as bad, and it'll also make it crash and it'll break apps and stuff - no thanks!

Again, never seen anything like the things that you describe on 6000+ PC's. No crashes or whatsoever. Only thing I ever came across is that formatting DVD-RAM disc's would not work unless I temporarily disable SAV. And corrupted Office installs? Well, I've seen that a lot also on my own PC that has never had NAV or SAV installed. Office is to unstable by itself to state that any other product can corrupt it.

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Again, never seen anything like the things that you describe on 6000+ PC's. No crashes or whatsoever.

Then, likely you haven't tried v10. It's not like we were an isolated case, there were even a slashdot article about this, and tons of people had similar problems/experiences with it. And the problems were very real - they're all documented on symantec's own support site.

And corrupted Office installs? Well, I've seen that a lot also on my own PC that has never had NAV or SAV installed.

I've hardly ever seen this (I could probably count it on the fingers of one hand), and we've got ~60k users (FAR more than 6k workstations!) Sounds like you're doing something wrong...

Office is to unstable by itself to state that any other product can corrupt it.

Not in my experience, no. And just try it: install office 2k on win2k pro (both fully patched), and then SAV10 - our success rate in it screwing up the install is ~100% (it'll ask for the install CD). It should be VERY easy to reproduce, so yes, it surely does corrupt office!

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