At this point in time i mostly be

[Luckypants]

Originally Posted by ThEGr33k

Norton is the worst program you could introduce to a computer. Id rather run with the virus's to be honest!

Originally Posted by Pedro68

Yeah, perhaps they should just drop the word "anti" from all their products

Explain - in factual terms - why? Perhaps my company would be interested to know why they have the wrong anti-virus solution installed on thousands of PCs?

Horses for courses Mike to be fair ...

I have used Norton, my brothers' used Norton, companies I've worked for have used Norton.

IMHO, and several years experience, Norton products (particularly the Internet Security Suite) gets its sticky little fingers into just about everything on a PC that comes in or goes out (and no doubt some things that don't, but I can't confirm that, so it's not strictly factual), and PERSONALLY I like to think I have sufficient experience to not require that level of "hand-holding" with respect to security on my PC's.

As for people with less experience, or who want an "all-in-one" product, and particularly for businesses, it appears to be a fairly "suitable" solution.

Personally, I'd rather use several different products that each do one simple job well.
As opposed to the "popular opinion" (and I'll try and find some to back me up on this) that Norton does a "reasonably good" job at most things, but it doesn't excel at any one in particular. That's the impression I have gleaned from working with it's products and its rivals products for the past 10 - 12 years or so.

EDIT:
I guess to be fair and to try and look at this from an unbiased POV, you have to say that Norton being the most popular AV product it is bound to have probably significantly more "incidents" or "horror stories" than other AV products.

I have heard several (and that's taking a conservative estimate) of such horror stories as NAV causing such serious problems for machines that those machines have had to be totally re-installed. I have never (seriously) heard of any other AV product that has caused such problems.

And if you want examples:
http://www.itreviews.co.uk/discuss/1154
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1GS5S5RRKFCRJ
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=198695

I'm sure there are millions of happy contented customers ... but I for one, am happy with the products I use, and at least when they screw up, I'm not left re-formatting a hard disk (a bit drastic, but the only product that has caused me to have to do that is Windows itself (95/9

[Luckypants]

Thanks Pedro. I don't see any facts there about Norton Anti-Virus, just opinions of folks posting on the net. I have heard that the Norton 'suite' can use a lot of resource, but we were talking anti-virus software here.

So no facts about NAV being no use as anti-virus software - just the usual FUD of the interweb. I have used it for years and am happy. Rarely have a problem with viruses.

However I agree with you about using software from several vendors and choosing 'best of breed' where possible. I use NAV cos in my experience it works, same with my firewall software and anti-spyware etc.

Originally Posted by Luckypants

Thanks Pedro. I don't see any facts there about Norton Anti-Virus, just opinions of folks posting on the net. I have heard that the Norton 'suite' can use a lot of resource, but we were talking anti-virus software here.

So no facts about NAV being no use as anti-virus software - just the usual FUD of the interweb. I have used it for years and am happy. Rarely have a problem with viruses.

Yeah, should really have got my facts straight before posting such a glib remark

Admittedly, a lot of the "problems" experienced by folk seem to be down to "other" symantec products, when in fact if you take the AV solution on it's own, it does seem to do a better-than-average job

Although not strictly "fact" ... I still feel that personal experience with Norton products (which included NAV) has tended to taint my opinion of their offerings.

Originally Posted by Luckypants

However I agree with you about using software from several vendors and choosing 'best of breed' where possible. I use NAV cos in my experience it works, same with my firewall software and anti-spyware etc.

NAV works, but the price you pay is in just how tightly integrated into the operating system and your internet connection it becomes. Some may say that's not such a bad thing, and some would say otherwise because of the resources that it tends to require to do it's job well.
Personally on an older PC with plenty of software installed that HAS led to problems in the past (for my poor old PC).
However I do realise it's probably unfair to tar all its products with the same brush ... after all, I haven't touched NAV for 2 years now, and I only used it then cos it came with 3 months FREE use on my laptop My poor experiences with NAV came with earlier versions of the software.

Just out of interest, what products do you use (apart from NAV)?

[Luckypants]

Originally Posted by Pedro68

Just out of interest, what products do you use (apart from NAV)?

Mainly ZoneAlarm Pro firewall. Several reasons for this

1. Was very robust when tested by my internerd friends at Kingston Communications (they have now moved on)
2. Cheap
3. Easy to configure and understand
4. My employer uses it, so I use it to keep them happy when all PC's share the same LAN in the house.

I have found AD-Aware SE to be good at getting rid of pop-ups and spyware, but not really had a problem with that since anti-spyware was built into ZoneAlarm.

Originally Posted by Luckypants

Mainly ZoneAlarm Pro firewall. Several reasons for this

1. Was very robust when tested by my internerd friends at Kingston Communications (they have now moved on)
2. Cheap
3. Easy to configure and understand
4. My employer uses it, so I use it to keep them happy when all PC's share the same LAN in the house.

I have found AD-Aware SE to be good at getting rid of pop-ups and spyware, but not really had a problem with that since anti-spyware was built into ZoneAlarm.

Yeah, I got ZoneAlarm (basic, free edition), and I also use Ad-Aware, but I use AVG instead of NAV. AVG is free,basic (not as complicated as NAV), but it does a reasonable job of stopping most stuff.