A Parting Of Ways
Peter Norton was a nice guy who wrote some pretty good code, useful things that made working with MS-DOS easier. He finally decided to leave the world of coding and sold his company to Symantec.
The quality of products labeled “Norton” has not been uniform since that happened, but I have stayed with Norton Anti-Virus mostly out of inertia. It was okay, it did the job. As long as you limited it to anti-virus and avoided the “all-in-one” System product, it didn’t get in the way.
Well, no longer. I upgraded starting at almost midnight last night and it took hours. They downloaded the new 2007 version, then immediately started upgrading all of the modules in the package. If I had bought a copy at a “brick and mortar” and installed it, I would expect having to upgrade, but I downloaded from their bloody site, so why didn’t they give me a pre-patched version?
Then they immediately wanted to do a system scan, when I wanted to go to bed. I do system scans at dinner time, because they take more than an hour, because the bloody software keep “forgetting” the drives I exempt, and scans the whole damn machine.
Inertia might have won again, but it started nagging me about renewing my subscription which doesn’t expire for three weeks. That’s it. The old version downloaded upgrades in the background, this one wants attention. They insist on using IE which requires adware scanning after every use because it is such a spyware magnet.
Screw Symantec. Other people will be receiving my money. I don’t appreciate utilities that intrude.
21 comments
Out of similar inertia, I used Symantec for years, and it’s still installed on the laptop. It will stay there until renewal time because I’m so cheap, but after my experience with Stella’s machine and Symantec 2007, I will not buy any more Symantec products. Buh-bye!
The new desktop machine came with a 10-day-license copy of NOD32 preinstalled, and on the recommendation of the folks at Micro Center, I purchased the packaged version. That was a couple of months ago, and to date, I’m happy with it. It’s quieter… much quieter… than Symantec. Unless you poke it to change settings or look at logs or some such, all you ever see is a tiny balloon near the notification area when it updates its definitions.
The proof of the pudding may take a while, but so far I have not been hammered by anything. Let me offer a recommendation, qualified only by the shortness of time I’ve used it.
…oh, believe me, I don’t need to read the rest of the entry. My outfit is in a computer replacement cycle, and I was one of the lucky stiffs to get a new Lenovo T60 Thinkpad to replace my beloved ‘old’ Dell Latitude. After an exciting self-installation process to get all the required applications onboard, I discovered that I could not save a document to our server without a crash (blue screen of death and automatic reboot)…
Turns out we have hundreds of new PC’s with the same problem. My IT ‘white knight’ has discovered that the only thing that fixes it is uninstalling Symantec. He is now battling through the bureaucratic layers to get IBM or Symantec to investigate whether Antivirus is actually the problem (they are fixating on Microsoft Office as the culprit) and gin up a patch; in the meantime we save to c:/ and drag/drop to the server (we won’t even talk about the 3-hour Tuesday morning virus scans)…
Steve, NOD32 looks pretty good based on reviews. It doesn’t scan outgoing e-mail, which is a plus as far as I’m concerned, because I’m not supposed to have any viruses on my computer if the software is doing it’s job. Consider, if the software finds a virus in something I send out, why didn’t it catch it earlier?
Jack, the damn thing came up and questioned my FTP program. I use an ancient FTP program that has been on the machine for years, and was approved years ago.
One of the “features” of the new version is looking for rogue scripts in MS Office which is very likely the problem on your system, i.e. it sees something it doesn’t like and is aborting the process. It is very ham-handed. My brother fought with Symantec for months over a problem with their all-in-one version, and I had to shut off their firewall after two-hours because it was blocking nearly everything out of the box.
I switched back to Norton because I thought McAfee’s (free through Comcast) A-V software was as slow and clunky as it could possibly get. Boy was I wrong! Even after I turned off the automatic live-update feature in Norton, the damn thing still tries to check the internet every freaking four hours and every time the computer is turned on with an internet connection active, which of course sucks up all available memory and prevents me from doing whatever it was I turned on my computer to do. If they’ve got a simple anti-virus product out or if there’s a better alternative, I’m all ears!
Is it too much to ask for something that runs quietly in the background with no fancy-schmancy bells and whistles, and doesn’t either hog the memory or the internet connection?
for this i thank you. i too used norton forever, out of inertia, even when my tech-savvier friends told me i’d be better off ditching it. i’ve been on the verge of buying the norton 2007 all-in-one, but decided to try some others first, since they were free, or offered me free trials for various reasons.
so far, i’ve been through mcafee, trend micro, and avg. avg doesn’t play nicely with my email. i can’t tell for sure what it is that mcafee isn’t getting along with, remnants of norton stuff i think. trend micro seems friendly enough, but i haven’t yet looked or asked around to see if anybody thinks highly of its abilities.
aha!
i knew somebody was rating them all. the standings have changed from last years review. it would be nice if you could install several different anti-malware packages, so they could each catch whatever the others let slip by, but they don’t play nicely with each other.
First off, Norton does not do a clean uninstall, so there’s always some crap left around that you have seek and destroy.
I’m looking at NOD32, BitDefender, and Kaspersky Anti-Virus.
I’m leaning towards NOD32 because it seems to be less obtrusive. If I were in a high threat environment, I might veer towards the others, because they are heavyweights, but I’m looking for less interaction, not more.
i surf the internet about like i drive [that bumper sticker if you don’t like my driving, get off the sidewalk could have been invented for me] and i’ve been using [and sometimes even writing] clunky software since god was knee-high to a commodore 64. i’m leaning towards the kaspersky, i think.
The system slowdown rate, and proactive components are more important to me than the minor difference in detection rate, so I think I’ll go with NOD. There are a lot of options, but you don’t need to use them.
Kaspersky is definitely the current leader, but they also are in the middle of the virus writers in the old Soviet bloc [they’re a Russian company], so they see the viruses [viri?] first.
Kaspersky served me well for a couple of years almost a decade ago. I changed only because a new computer came with Symantec preinstalled, and I’m not sure it was a good decision on my part to change.
In any case, NOD has done a respectable job to this point, and has not behaved in any annoying ways. Well, OK, it wasn’t very clear on why it stopped updating when my temporary license ran out on the new computer… but day-to-day it is no hassle at all, and there is no perceptible drain on speed or resources.
Stella’s Symantec 2007, OTOH, sucks processor cycles like mother’s milk, and updates are painfully slow… and her machine is a good deal faster than my own. (Remember, she bought it to process video; she had a good reason for a fast system.) If I have anything to say about it, she will not renew Symantec next year.
hmmmm… after reading those 3 links, i’m re-thinking. bit defender is the only one that mentions instant messaging. i surf only slightly more than i im.
Steve, the slow updates are really weird. They are reading some data files for signatures. It’s almost as if they are doing a complete merge-purge every time it happens. Not a very efficient system.
Hipparchia, I notice the IM thing, but I also noticed the lost cycles from all of this surveillance. Bit Defender is the slowest of the group on the PC Mag comparison.
argh! trade-offs, trade-offs! computers are supposed to be our slaves, not the other way around. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
newest solution: 3 computers. one not hooked up to anything at all. one with heavy security just for online transactions and communications. one just for surfing the internet, and nothing else on it, so that i can periodically format c: and re-install a basic os and browser when it gets too bogged down.
If you are going to multiple boxes, you could build a Linux box for surfing, which ignores most viruses, but it would include all of the IM software.
hipparchia, I’m not an IMer myself, but I noticed when I put up Ubuntu Linux on an old computer recently that it supports clients for a couple of the more popular IM services. I really don’t know what I’m talking about here 🙂 but if you’re truly going to multiple computers, it might be worth your looking into. As Bryan notes, viruses that target Linux are rare, and unlike Windows, it’s designed from the ground up with security in mind.
The only “Instant Messaging” I use is usually called conversation, and it works in person or over the telephone.
I had to put up with what is known as “IM” today working on corporate networks and I found it singularly annoying.
i’ve got two older computers sitting around. well 3, actually, but i’m only keeping the ibm ps2 till i can figure out how to get some stuff off of it and onto a newer computer, as it’s the one i had back when i was dabbling in freelance writing. for pay, not just as a penny-ante blogger. i’d really like to salvage some of those words if i could.
i’ve been considering converting at least one of the others to a linux box, just because i like geeking around with stuff. now that i’ve finally bitten the bullet and am paying for fast internet, rather than dialup, it actually seems worth doing [setting up more than one computer].
conversation? what’s that?
seriously, though, i’ve got family and friends scattered around the countryside, and we can all converse like houses on fire. my phone bills used to be horrendous, and with the advent of email, i not only saved moey, i actually got to “talk” with [and get to know] these people even more. im is just faster email.
and for the price of one or two of my old phone bills, you can buy one of the nicer webcams and have video instant messaging. my parents, my brother, and i think a few other famiy members, have done this, but i’m not quite that gregarious and have resisted so far.
i’m still marginally sane: i haven’t really gotten into text messaging, though i have tried it.
dirk gently was right about that interconnectedness of all things. 🙂
I assume the PS2 was a straight ms-dos machine and it had a floppy. There shouldn’t be a problem if it will still boot. If it were to be one of the OS/2 machines there might be a problem, but not insurmountable if you don’t wait until there are no more 3½” floppies available.
Linux is a good choice for an old machine. If I can ever convince my last W95 client to move to something different, that machine is going to Linux.
the ps2 is a windows 3.something machine, i think [i could be confused at this point], but can be run in dos something.something. it’s been a while since i did anything with it [obviously], but the last time i tried to turn it on, it just ran and ran and ran… i’m thinking this isn’t a good sign. i’ve been weighing how much it’s worth to me to take it somewhere and pay a professional try to save the data.
tell me i’m not hallucinatiing [or put me out of my misery and tell me i am hallucinating]– didn’t there used to be a fairly simple, easy-to-get program that will read every byte [bit? i don’t remember] off of one disk and write it onto another? you wouldn’t happen to know where i can get a copy would you?
the other two machines are win95 and 98, they both have 3.5″ drives, and i have spare floppies. the files i especially want to save are small enough to fit on floppies. i’m all set, if i can just figure a way around the boot problem.
Sounds like you need to turn it on and let it run to get the drives up to operating speed. They get slow if they aren’t run for a while.
If you can’t get the drive up to speed, you have to send it to a data recovery company, because it will have to be put on a new spindle and motor to be read. That’s a clean room operation.
It was probably trying to spin up to be readable, but didn’t reach operating speed.
It was probably Windows 3.1 which ran on top of DOS 3.1 to DOS 6.22.
window 3.1 and dos 6.22 sound familiar.
i’ll try letting it run for a bit longer. the clean room explains the high price i was quoted. thanks for that info.