Why don't people like Norton/Symantec IS/AV?

[Dav27]

I have recently been using Nortons IS 2010, got a free upgrade from the old 2009 version for the remainder of the liscence which expires sometime in January. Every since i upgraded to the IS 2010 i noticed it seemed more responsive then the 2009 and my system seems slightly quicker.

Alot of people say its "bloatware" slow etc but what is that based on? Personally i don't seem to have a problem with it, Notrons IS 2010, i like the features, layout and the way you can see a graphical history of all the software has done, as well as its optomise feature. I am not saying its the best as i have never had any other AV/IS software other than Symantecs.

Reason i ask is obviously i will be upgrading of changing my IS software in January and wanted to know what people use/think etc.

What are the views on paid AVG, MSSE, Kaspersky IS 2010, Nortos IS 2010 etc and are there any sites/links that may have run all programs and compared them (latest versions).

Cheers.

[Hance]

I have limited experience with newer versions of norton because I run avg. I can tell you this though a few years ago NAV was probably the single most bloated piece of crapware on the planet. My limited experience with the new version of Norton was fairly positive. It is much much faster and more streamlined than the older versions.

[JJCDAD]

I had bad experiences with Norton/Symantec products years ago and swore I'd never use them again. So I can't comment on their current generation of products.

I have used Avast and AVG free solutions, and they drove me nuts with popups wanting me to upgrade or update or whatever.

Recently I switched to MSE and couldn't be happier. It is as invisible as I could imagine. It silently protects and updates.

[Madman]

Once it was ok, then it got bloated, now I don't know.

All I know is I use AVG free for like 3 years but lately it starts to annoy me with heavyweight updates, or maybe the engine is simply slow, and I've turned the real-time scan on my laptop off. Then again it has 256MB of RAM shared with integrated graphics... So I don't know.

[nerdrage]

Norton was re-written in 2009 and is actually a good product now, but around here nobody is willing to believe that. Bad memories of Norton 2003-2008 and the proliferation of free AV products is the main reason IMO.

[Skrying]

Norton was re-written in 2009 and is actually a good product now, but around here nobody is willing to believe that. Bad memories of Norton 2003-2008 and the proliferation of free AV products is the main reason IMO.

I'm willing to believe it's greatly improved. I'm also willing to believe they put users, and especially us that supported those users, though years and year of pain and only reacted when they started losing business. I see little point in buying a AV product these days with great free products on the market. Microsoft's own Security Essentials is very good and its hands off approach is superior for the vast majority of computer users I know.

[_Sigma]

The 2003 era of their product was painful. Uninstalling it would typically result in an unbootable or just generally screwed up computer. Upgrading it resulted in the same thing.
It was slow, memory intensive. They started to loose customers, etc. So it was rewritten and the new 2009 was much improved and 2010 is, I personally think, one of the better AVs out there now.

[bthylafh]

All I know is I use AVG free for like 3 years but lately it starts to annoy me with heavyweight updates, or maybe the engine is simply slow, and I've turned the real-time scan on my laptop off. Then again it has 256MB of RAM shared with integrated graphics... So I don't know.

AVG Free 9 is noticeably faster than the 8.x series. Not scientifically tested, but seat-of-the-pants feel on my wife's old P4 Celeron-2.4 laptop w/4200 RPM hard drive & 1GB of RAM.

Your RAM is going to severely limit you, yes. You should upgrade to minimum 512MB and preferably as far as the old thing will go.

[Dav27]

Thanks for the replies all.

It seems alot of people have had previously poor experiences with the old era Norton products and i tend to agree with the comments. Would any of you be prepaired to give the Nortons IS 2010 a free 30 day trial so you can compare the product to what you currently use. Yhen post on it. You may be pleasently suprised.

BTW, this is not an advert, not do i work for Symantec, just want to get a feel for is IS 2010 is worthy of my hard earned cash come January.

Thanks again for the comments.

[Airmantharp]

You want us to test it for you? Because you can't test it yourself?

[Flying Fox]

The big problem really is all the free alternatives out there making names for themselves. To lure people back to pay them money is hard. They simply had waited too long to bite that bullet and now almost everyone related with the tech geek community know of their bad rep and all the other alternatives.

[A_Pickle]

Yeah, I dunno. I guess I'll float in the same boat here, that Symantec ruined their reputation for me by delivering sub-par products for the vast majority of it's lifetime. It seems like they've tried hard to make the software fast and not sucky, but that's too little, too late. AVG and Avast were there for me years ago when Symantec was charging money for it's terrible product, and I've used them ever since Microsoft Security Essentials came out. Now I use that... and that's a fast program, built off of the OneCare codebase and virus definitions which get good security scores.

Why would I give a 30-day trial the time of day, when I can install MSE once and be done with it? Symantec lost me as a customer by providing sub-par products. They're gonna have to offer something significantly better than what they normally offer to lasso me back in.

[just brew it!]

It was a combination of Norton AV bloatware/crapware and ruining Norton Ghost that soured me on Symantec. I just don't trust 'em any more, and it would take multiple glowing recommendations to get me to shell out any money for another Symantec product.

[Dav27]

You want us to test it for you? Because you can't test it yourself?

I am running Nortons IS 2010 and have been for a while, as previously stated. I only suggested you may wish to try it then give an opinion as currently all Norton comments are based on old software and not the latest product.

[Dav27]

Yeah, I dunno. I guess I'll float in the same boat here, that Symantec ruined their reputation for me by delivering sub-par products for the vast majority of it's lifetime. It seems like they've tried hard to make the software fast and not sucky, but that's too little, too late. AVG and Avast were there for me years ago when Symantec was charging money for it's terrible product, and I've used them ever since Microsoft Security Essentials came out. Now I use that... and that's a fast program, built off of the OneCare codebase and virus definitions which get good security scores.

Why would I give a 30-day trial the time of day, when I can install MSE once and be done with it? Symantec lost me as a customer by providing sub-par products. They're gonna have to offer something significantly better than what they normally offer to lasso me back in.

Come January i may try MSSE and see what it's like before renewing or purchasing a new Norton product. Cheers

[Mentawl]

Two options to try to compare to Norton IS are Microsoft's new Security Essentials (http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/) or AVG's free version (http://free.avg.com). I gotta say, I've had no issues with the new Security Essentials - it's lightweight, inobtrusive, and has found a few (not too nasty) bits of malware in backups from my sister's laptop etc that I didn't know were there, and that NOD32 hasn't noticed yet. I'm putting SE on any PC I build

[titan]

The foremost issue I have with Norton is having to pay for virus updates. All of the free competitors also provide free updates.

I've also had many technical difficulties with Norton. Ranging from a slow system to an unusable network card.

[_Sigma]

Two options to try to compare to Norton IS are Microsoft's new Security Essentials (http://www.microsoft.com/Security_Essentials/) or AVG's free version (http://free.avg.com). I gotta say, I've had no issues with the new Security Essentials - it's lightweight, inobtrusive, and has found a few (not too nasty) bits of malware in backups from my sister's laptop etc that I didn't know were there, and that NOD32 hasn't noticed yet. I'm putting SE on any PC I build

So you can run MSE AND a dedicated AV together without any issues?

[JustAnEngineer]

Previous versions of Norton AV/IS were intense resource hogs. Besides bogging down the system, they popped up false positive warnings for a lot of stuff that made web usage a pain. However, I'm currently running Norton 360 on my notebook, and it's not too bad. I wonder if they've learned a bit from the lean Symantec corporate AV. My desktop and HTPC are still running AVG.

[Flying Fox]

I wonder if they've learned a bit from the lean Symantec corporate AV. My desktop and HTPC are still running AVG.

Since after v10 of SAV corporate, they switched to this whole "Endpoint protection" crap, which seems even more bloated than their older consumer versions. It made a lot of our systems very slow while hogging a bunch of memory. Our IT guy decided to ditch it and moved us all over to Kaspersky AV. Don't know about their latest version, but looks like it may take them several years to correct any bloatness. Not holding out any hope when there are so much good (if not better) competition out there.

[Tamale]

I guess I'm in the minority for simply choosing not to run any anti virus?

I like my windows installs to be as lean as possible.. I v-lite them, strip out IE, MSN, and lots of useless services, put in firefox (and recently chrome), and make sure I'm getting all updates.. and haven't had a virus in over a decade..

since vista, it's been even better for myself and others.. I don't have to take IE out anymore

[Jigar]

I guess I'm in the minority for simply choosing not to run any anti virus?

I like my windows installs to be as lean as possible.. I v-lite them, strip out IE, MSN, and lots of useless services, put in firefox (and recently chrome), and make sure I'm getting all updates.. and haven't had a virus in over a decade..

since vista, it's been even better for myself and others.. I don't have to take IE out anymore

Nice, i don't use any antivirus either, (I am currently using Vista Ultimate 64bit) but would like to have it hanging around with the browser that i use. Can you tell me if Firefox has a inbuilt antivirus which can alert me if there is any virus attached to website that i am browsing ?

[TheEmrys]

First off, there are three kinds of computer users out there.
1. People who are true experts. These are the folks who may not be designing circuits, but they can slap a system together in no time and understand why they make the choices they did as well as configure the software "just how they or someone else wants."
2. People who just want it to work. They don't care what it takes, just make it work. They like clicking through pretty flashing links to says their computer may be infected. Just in case.
3. People with enough knowledge to be dangerous. These are the folks who read a few articles and mostly talk to their friends (who also don't really know things) about what's "best." These are the folks that generally cause more harm then good, often believing that a particular brand is better and enjoys arguing about it, particularly with their uninformed friends.

I'm not anti-Norton since 2009. But I'm not Pro-norton either. I loved Norton Utlities back in the day. Phenominal set of DOS tools. Even the first few versions of SystemWorks was good. But they really got lazy with making the software as intrusive as possible. I am sure it was an inter-departmental battle between the Sales/Marketting folk telling everyone that the key to long-term sustainability was by making people dependant upon the software. The problem being that the intelligentsia of desktop support realized that its pervasiveness was hinderance to what needed to be done.

Group 1 was opposed to Norton. When smart members of Group 3 paid attention to what Group 1 said, they repeated what they heard because all the cool kids like to bash on things (see MS, Google, Apple, Intel, Motorola, nVidia, AMD/ATI, Asus, etc.) that do things pretty well. Group 2 was generally happy with Norton, because it worked. Who cared if it was efficient?

The problem occurred when Norton became a bit sloppy and would miss things. Then they would call their neighborhood tech expert or friend (who may be in Group 2 or 3) who would then inform them that either a) Norton wasn't very efficient and occaisionally missed things and couldn't remove them or b) Norton = teh lose.

In the mean time, while Norton was trying to figure out why their Marketing folk got it wrong, companies like Eset (NOD32) and Kaspersky started doing things right. AV was lean, quick, and had a tiny memory footprint. Oh, and they managed to not miss much at all. Group 1 was happy. AVG and Avast cranked out free options, and lots of people liked free.

Me, I still go for something good. I am a firm believer in Nod32 and Kaspersky. That being said, I used Microsofts OneCare because it came free with my ISP, and I was very suprised at how good it was. I've now moved on to Security Essentials. I have heard good things about Norton, but I just don't see a reason to change. And I used Norton for a solid 10 years from back in the glory days of DOS.

[TheEmrys]

I guess I'm in the minority for simply choosing not to run any anti virus?

I like my windows installs to be as lean as possible.. I v-lite them, strip out IE, MSN, and lots of useless services, put in firefox (and recently chrome), and make sure I'm getting all updates.. and haven't had a virus in over a decade..

since vista, it's been even better for myself and others.. I don't have to take IE out anymore

This is just plain silly. If you don't have AV, how would you know if you had one? And with all the decent free options, it really isn't a practical approach for a PC*

Ounce of prevention, and all that.

* Edited for PC distinction - Linux and Mac's have yet to be heartily targeted.

[NeXus 6]

Working in a repair shop was enough for me to dislike their AV, but I had used it on my own PCs for awhile and didn't care for the bloat. I never found it to be very effective compared to NOD32, so I stopped using it. Watching PCs come into the shop everyday infected with thousands of viruses and Norton installed was comedy.

[bdwilcox]

Norton/Symantec products have two Achilles Heels. First is the amount of resources they take up. They've tried to trim this down, but they're still behind their competition. Second is their intrusiveness. I consider them the AV equivalent of HP's printer drivers. They get into every part of your PC, make changes for themselves, set up their own shop, and when they break, good luck brother trying to get them out without destroying everything else in Windows.

[bdwilcox]

Working in a repair shop was enough for me to dislike their AV, but I had used it on my own PCs for awhile and didn't care for the bloat. I never found it to be very effective compared to NOD32, so I stopped using it. Watching PCs come into the shop everyday infected with thousands of viruses and Norton installed was comedy.

The same can be said for McAfee. I think the most fun is when someone has both McAfee and Norton on their system, both running simultaneously, grinding everything to a halt, and they're still infected with viruses and trojans.

[NeXus 6]

The same can be said for McAfee. I think the most fun is when someone has both McAfee and Norton on their system, both running simultaneously, grinding everything to a halt, and they're still infected with viruses and trojans.

Oh yeah, I saw some of that, too.

We sold NOD32 and recommended it to customers. If they preferred to stick with Norton or McAfee we recommended more RAM. Either way we usually got a sale.

[kvndoom]

Working in a repair shop was enough for me to dislike their AV, but I had used it on my own PCs for awhile and didn't care for the bloat. I never found it to be very effective compared to NOD32, so I stopped using it. Watching PCs come into the shop everyday infected with thousands of viruses and Norton installed was comedy.

The same can be said for McAfee. I think the most fun is when someone has both McAfee and Norton on their system, both running simultaneously, grinding everything to a halt, and they're still infected with viruses and trojans.

The 90day free trial crap was a big part of that too. Joe sixpack buys a computer that has antivirus on it, and after 3 months it tells him he has to pay money to keep his AV up to date. Of course he isn't going to pay money; he paid for the computer already! So time goes by and he forgets about that little episode, and now the definitions and updates are old, but he thinks that he is still secure because "I have anti-virus installed." I have worked on computers whose virus definitions were literally years old, but the owners couldn't understand why there could be a problem when the little yellow shield was down there in the system tray.

[Scrotos]

I wonder if they've learned a bit from the lean Symantec corporate AV. My desktop and HTPC are still running AVG.

Since after v10 of SAV corporate, they switched to this whole "Endpoint protection" crap, which seems even more bloated than their older consumer versions. It made a lot of our systems very slow while hogging a bunch of memory. Our IT guy decided to ditch it and moved us all over to Kaspersky AV. Don't know about their latest version, but looks like it may take them several years to correct any bloatness. Not holding out any hope when there are so much good (if not better) competition out there.

Yes, we deployed this. Apparently upgrading the engine version is a pain in the ass as their support forums are full of people with the same problems we have... SNAC randomly installing itself as a service, clients not reporting in, etc.