Norton

Posted by: wfaulk

Norton - 30/06/2004 02:59

I got a new laptop and it has a bunch of stuff on it, including a bunch of Norton crud. I already don't like it, but I wanted to get some feedback on it before I killed it all.

The stuff I see is Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security. It's the IS that's bothering me, but the AV is only a three month trial. Should I just delete them both?
Posted by: Laura

Re: Norton - 30/06/2004 03:23

I like Norton Antivirus but I hated the Internet Security very much. I hated it so much that I went out and bought a copy of Antivirus because I couldn't find a way to get it to work without the rest of the IS stuff since the virsion I had all came together. I've got an older computer (a P3 550) and it just bogged it down way too much.
Posted by: matthew_k

Re: Norton - 30/06/2004 04:17

Yup. Ditch the firewall component immediatly and pray the uninstall function works. It's slow and buggy, and every once in a while it will totaly hose all windows networking on install.

Norton antivirus however, is a good thing in my book. I like the corporate version my school has a site liscense for a lot better than the user edition, but I assume it's dificult to buy as an individual.

Matthew
Posted by: JBjorgen

Re: Norton - 30/06/2004 11:56

As if you need someone else to say it...I agree...ditch the IS and keep the AV.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 14:08

FWIW, removing IS also removed AV, so there you go. Guess I'll be installing AVG again.
Posted by: ashmoore

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 14:34

unfortunatley I agree with the killing of IS.
The sad part is that it used to be ATGuard, which was a very cool program and the first decent personal firewall and ad blocker.
Bits of it still remain in IS but Symantec really screwed it up.
Posted by: DLF

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 15:02

Curiosity: Why does nobody here seem to like McAfee Enterprise 7.x?
Posted by: Ezekiel

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 15:15

Quote:
Curiosity: Why does nobody here seem to like McAfee Enterprise 7.x?


Haven't used 7.X but VirusScan 4.5.1 has been pretty good to me (about 30 seats controlled by E-Policy Orchestrator).

-Zeke
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 15:38

The last time I used McAfee it had the equivalent effect of replacing the CPU with one one-third the speed and replacing the hard drive with something made from tree bark and knives.
Posted by: DLF

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 16:00

That's funny, because that was my experience (albeit, many years ago) with Norton AV. Nowadays all I notice re: performance is the on-access "shield" slows down boot-up. But compared to crap like the Palm HotSync Manager and the latest ZoneAlarm, it's still trivial.
Posted by: Roger

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 18:35

Quote:
...and replacing the hard drive with something made from tree bark and knives.


Ah, all I had to do to get this to happen was to install nVidia's "enhanced" IDE drivers.

At least, I think it's that, and not McAfee.

Too scared to uninstall them now, though.
Posted by: Ezekiel

Re: Norton - 01/07/2004 19:44

Yeah, nothing like goofing with IDE or chipset drivers just for grins. [shudder]

I use a registry patch that limits McAfee to 30% of CPU for any scan task, it's pretty effective and can post it if needed. I've used on 2k & XP boxes.

-Zeke
Posted by: Taym

Re: Norton - 05/07/2004 09:06

Quote:
Curiosity: Why does nobody here seem to like McAfee Enterprise 7.x?


Personally, that's what I would recommend. Like you, I have nothing to complain about it. It's good and does not come with the ugly and confusing "user friendly" interface of the Professional version. You may want to try the 8.0 Enterprise version, which seems good to me, even though I only tested for a week.

Also, I would disable the On-Access scan from McAfee and instead rely on more responsible periodic manual scan iniciated by the user, since the user in this case is a geek like everybody here and knows what he is doing. Having the AV scan every single file you access (or the system accesses) is what really slow down any machine. No matter how powerful it is, with the On-Access Scan OFF it will be faster.
I would as well disable any email component/outlook plugin in it. Thet do slow down everything when you have outlook running. Again, if you know what you're doing, you
1) Update outlook constantly to fix bugs
2) Scan attachments you're not sure about, or don't run them at all
I found this true with any other email client McAfee makes plug ins for.

One good thing I found in MCAfee Enterprise is that its scheduler is reliable and does not take CPU at all, as it should be. I have a daily check for updates and a weekly global scan on my server and it very simply... works, always; and I don't even notice it's there when it is not scanning. Which is all that an AV should do, I believe.

Firewall: I gave up using any integrated package, since they all seemed slow and not well configurable to me. I still use Kerio Personal Firewall, 2.1.5, free. Newer vrsions are shareware and I don't know how good they are. 2.1.5 works perfectly to me and it's free.

I had the worst experience with Norton, which did slow down terribly any machine I tried it on, regardless of how I configure it. I haven't tried their latest release, though.