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An opinion of Norton 2006 from a tech support rep's point of view.Feb 26 '06 Write an essay on this topic.The Bottom Line Norton officially made Internet Security and Antivirus 2006 junkware. If you install it, you'll run the risk of severe system slowdown to a total crash of windows XP. First off, I actually do not own any Norton software. And to be frank, I never will. I work as a tech support rep for a very large computer support company. Ever since Norton came out with the 2006 editions of their software, we have been getting swamped with calls about problems created by THEIR software. Suddenly sluggish performance, failure to delete items (viruses, trojans, etc) that it should be able to get rid of, to total crashing of windows XP. You name, Norton did it. What could cause this? Maybe the beta testers were out partying when they should have been actually TESTING the software. Or maybe the software programmers got drunk and decided to make the 6 (no, that's not a misprint) processes it puts in a system use up 25-35 megs of memory EACH. We don't know. Go to cnet.com and you'll see that over 100 people have testified about Norton Internet Security (NIS) 2006 and Antivirus (NAV) 2006, and out of those people, 95% of those people have givin NAV and NIS a score of 3.5 out of ten combined. There are some people on cnet.com that have commented that, "It's not the software, it's your computer." Both NAV and NIS have received a combined score, if you put them together, of 3.5 from over 100 people on Cnet.com. I can see if only 10 people had issues but when 95 out of over those 100 people have serious issues, then it's NOT their PCs. Many of the people who call in about this are NOT novices, either. A man called in, he had a brand new 4 day old PC with a huge hard drive and 1 gig of memory, he installed NIS 2006 and it crashed Win XP, he had to format and reload windows - I gave him the URL to Grisoft and told him to try their software. Another person upgraded to NIS 2006 and it made his system run pathetically slow. We got rid of it and installed AVG+firewall edition, and it ran like a champ. Oh, and about those people who blame it on people's PCs. I can make a safe bet those are Norton reps, angry that their precious Norton dropped the ball on this one. BTW, the reason why we are getting so many of these calls is because Norton's tech support is really NON-technical support and people are fed up with them. 90% of the time, people can't understand what they are saying, and they often times make things worse. This's isn't limited to NIS. NAV is having the same issues and now there is a glitch with the licensing that makes it unusable where even uninstalling will not fix the issue - and Norton will NOT provide a fix for 2 weeks. Even Ghost 10 has issues - I had a call from a man who installed Ghost 10 on a PC that had an AMD dual-core 4400+ CPU and all the bells and whistles. Before he installed it, it took 5 seconds to shut down and with Ghost it took about 25. Norton tech support's answer? "It's because you have an AMD processor." I told him that's not the case and the new Norton software has been widely reported to be a bit buggy - he agreed with me and said he will use another imaging program. So, what do I suggest? For free protection, use the freeware version of Grisoft's AVG antivirus and Zone Alarm. For antispyware use Ad-aware and Ewido (be sure to not install the real-time feature, though). You won't get tech support, though. If you don't mind paying, get the version of AVG that includes the firewall. For $50 it gives you a 2 year license and it makes Norton instantly seem like junkware. And from what I hear, their tech support is one of the best. For spyware, download the two above mentioned apps and you'll be set. Oh, and about AVG: it find things that Norton misses. Finally, to get rid of Norton 2006 easily you'll need SymNRT. You can do a search for it on majorgeeks.com That's all I have to say. Remember, just because a product has a name, doesn't mean it's good!  |
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