Norton - criminally sh*t

Bob_Harris

How do Norton get away with selling their products?

Every PC I've been called upon to fix for friends and family have had Norton pre installed, and on every occasion I remove Norton and replace it with a decent antivirus / firewall package.

The new antivirus ALWAYS finds multiple viruses which Norton has missed. On more than one occasion Norton has actually been the root cause of problems. One persons computer was randomly, and frequently, freezing and generally running really slow. I simply un-installed Norton, installed Avast and all freezing and slowness magically went away.

It's not only AV and Internet security they are **** at; I've used Power Quest Partition magic numerous times. Creating partitions, merging, resizing, deleting etc.

I upgraded from the Power Quest version to the Norton Version tonight, and went about merging two partitions together. Only minutes into the procedure and it returns an error message and tells me to reboot.

I attempt to reboot, but the partition I had XP on is now totally corrupt.

Great. Thanks Norton.

P.S. I'm not seeking help, I've put the hard drive into an external enclosure and am repairing it now so I will be able to recover my files. This is more of a how the f**k do they get away with it kind of thread.

Overheal

ive not had any of these problems on any of my builds.

you used the norton removal tool?

yoyo

While the newer Norton product is receiving good reviews the older versions were rubbish, many times I got called as the pc is very slow, or unresponsive, removing the norton/mc affee from them magically made them faster :P . Apparenty Norton 2009 is actually quite a desent solution, certainly Nortons history of releases have been disasters though

Nick

AlmightyCushion

Norton used to be completely woeful. The newer versions seemed to have improved alot. Last time I checked mcafee is still utter crap.

yoyo

AlmightyCushion wrote: »

Norton used to be completely woeful. The newer versions seemed to have improved alot. Last time I checked mcafee is still utter crap.

Yes mc affee is still useless, was setting up a netbook yesterday and its shocking how much faster XP performed with the garbage removed, not to mention the constant pop ups warning you you are not protected and need to register :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Nick

AlmightyCushion

yoyo wrote: »

Yes mc affee is still useless, was setting up a netbook yesterday and its shocking how much faster XP performed with the garbage removed, not to mention the constant pop ups warning you you are not protected and need to register :rolleyes::rolleyes:

Nick

All I know is that I was setting up a dell and it had booted into windows for the first time. The thing was completely unresponsive for about 15 seconds until the mc afee logo appeared and then it started repsonding to input. Never see any other internet security package do that.

cherryghost

AVG, Avast or Comodo ftw. Free, upgrade to full protection if you wish. AVG has gone pants lately though

BrokenArrows

ya im coming across alot of problems with norton these days in work.

it for some reason sometimes randomly identifies my companies software as a virus and deletes it.

very strange as the same version of norton on another computer does not detect any problems. very random but very common and is really annoying to fix.

BopNiblets

I'm installing Comodo on machines for people these days, not sure how good the antivirus component is but at least it's better than Nortoooooooon!

Overheal

BrokenArrows wrote: »

ya im coming across alot of problems with norton these days in work.

it for some reason sometimes randomly identifies my companies software as a virus and deletes it.

very strange as the same version of norton on another computer does not detect any problems. very random but very common and is really annoying to fix.

That could be anything. I was asked as part of the hire to maintain the PCs in my slowtime and the free stuff (Avast, etc) is finding viruses all over the shop (wow thats not just an expression!) so they may really just be infected depending on who was doing what at the time. My boss tried running Adobe Photoshop and Avast gave him a stink. Now after cleaning it wont run. But it was cracked, and I had to have a talk with him about looted software risks.

Now I liked norton 08 and 09 is a vast improvement. norton 10 beta looks a bit more powerful too, its being optimized for windows 7. anyone can get a free trial of that. i was about to expire, but clicking renew gets you an extra 30 days. wonder how long that will last. there was some norton adware on that machine at some point - annoying POS: one of those "Ill scan your PC but you have to pay for me to actually do anything" piles of crap that shipped as bloatware. ugh

bluestarweb

avg is decent, karpersky is probably the best, but both norton and mcafee leave a lot to be desired

Effluo

bluestarweb wrote: »

karpersky is probably the best, but both norton and mcafee leave a lot to be desired

Should have seen someone going on about kapersky here a couple of weeks ago. Bottom line? Install anti-virus computer broke....

Bob_Harris

BopNiblets wrote: »

I'm installing Comodo on machines for people these days

I tried Comodo Internet Security on my laptop a few days. A bit disappointing tbh.

Lead to some freezing and didn't automatically turn of Windows Firewall which I assumed it would (like all other firewalls do).

So I was getting conflicting alerts from the two of them before I turned the Windows one off.

Also when the anti-virus updated it's definitions, it wanted me to restart my computer. Like ZOMG!!!!?

Keano

Bob_Harris wrote: »

I tried Comodo Internet Security on my laptop a few days. A bit disappointing tbh.

Lead to some freezing and didn't automatically turn of Windows Firewall which I assumed it would (like all other firewalls do).

So I was getting conflicting alerts from the two of them before I turned the Windows one off.

Also when the anti-virus updated it's definitions, it wanted me to restart my computer. Like ZOMG!!!!?

I have Comodo installed on my laptop and find it great. Never get those restart prompts you mention. Perhaps there is an restart after update checkbox ?

Overheal

kapersky is a name i hear a lot but i dont know anything about them except to say they are a flavor some people like the taste of.

Keano

Overheal wrote: »

kapersky is a name i hear a lot but i dont know anything about them except to say they are a flavor some people like the taste of.

I use Kapersky on my pc and it runs away in the background and uses very little memory but it not free. Best anti-virus/firewall program I have ever used.

AlmightyCushion

I'm not that big a fan of kaspersky. I haven't used it myself but I have heard lots of good things about it. Lots of bad things too. I've seen a lot of people who can't connect to the internet. It turned out kaspersky was blocking their connection because it didn't trust it. I think they were all mobile broadband connections.

TonyM.

I run Microsoft Security Essentials with Windows 7 and outpost windows pro.
it does the job and its FOC.

mikemac

Buy a mac, no such issues

Overheal

I think they were all mobile broadband connections.

I could see that happening. Its still real strange to see a modem recognize itself through USB. or were these builtins and PCMIA cards

An Fear Aniar

mikemac wrote: »

Buy a mac, no such issues

Or try an easy-to-use Linux distro like Ubuntu, like I did. On my home computer I have no need of Windows at all.

.

Omnipresence

An Fear Aniar wrote: »

Or try an easy-to-use Linux distro like Ubuntu, like I did. On my home computer I have no need of Windows at all.

.

Yup - here here - Ubuntu Desktop is pretty savage now.... and IF you need windows just run it in a free VM tool like VirtualBox and let it get riddled with viruses and you wont care cause you can go back to your last nice clean snaphot if needs be...

If you need Windows native for Gaming or something create a dedicated partiton for this that is tuned just for gaming - no anti-virus running and half of the services turned off - and just stay off the internet apart from activations...

Bob_Harris

mikemac wrote: »

Buy a mac, no such issues

Only because nobody bothers their ass to write viruses for Macs because of the tiny user base :pac:

Linux is OK, if you have a nice set of generic hardware and if you plan on doing only basic tasks. Try doing anything out of the norm and be prepared to spend hours trawling forums looking for solutions to the countless problems.

PS. NOD32 is king. It stays nice and quite and uses a very small amount of resources.

Overheal

There are, as far as we know, no Mac OS X viruses in the wild.

To prove that assertion wrong, you only have to name one.

Academic proofs of concept and theoretical vulnerabilities don't count. Neither do computer worms, Trojan horses, spyware, adware, spam or any of the other nasty species in the zoology of malware.

That eliminates Inqtana-A, iBotNet, MacSweeper and a handful of other examples of Mac malware usually trotted out at this point by PC apologists. Nor can you count the 10-second Zero Day Pwn2Own Safari exploit that got so much press attention last March. None of these, strictly speaking, were viruses.

The issue comes up anew because Apple's (AAPL) latest Get a Mac ads are once again hammering Microsoft (MSFT) for those "thousands of viruses" to which its operating systems and application suites are heir. And that, in turn, has led to a resurgence of comments in this space to the effect that a) Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows machines and b) the only thing that protects them is their miniscule market share.

Those ideas, while widely promulgated on the Web, are wrong. The fact that Mac OS X represents less than 4% of the worldwide installed base of computers might explain why there are fewer Mac viruses. But it wouldn't explain why there are none.

So what's the answer?

First, let's define some terms.

A Mac OS X virus in the wild, to use the definition put forward in a short-lived contest that offered $25,000 to the first hacker who could write one, is executable code that attaches itself to a program or file so that it can spread from one Mac to another. "In the wild" means it has infected, or is currently infecting, new machines through normal day-to-day usage.

By this definition, there have been hundreds, if not thousands, of Windows viruses (see partial list), a handful of Mac OS 9 viruses, and not one for Mac OS X.

The reasons for this have been extensively debated by security experts, who offer several explanations:

* Small market share. There is some truth to the "security through obscurity" argument. Many virus writers are motivated by the power they can command — and the money they can make — by seizing control of large numbers of computers. That puts a financial premium on Windows viruses.
* Mac OS X, with its Unix-based file system and kernel, is harder to infect with a self-replicating program. (See Claudiu Dumitru's MacOS X Vulnerabilities for background.) Windows, as I understand it, allows users to write run executable code outside their own protected memory space; Mac OS X does not.
* Viruses are going out of style. The action these days, I'm told, is in Trojans and spyware.

This is not to say that OS X is invulnerable. The frequency of Apple's security updates and the emphasis the company is putting on the new security features in Snow Leopard are proof that it is not. Maybe Apple is just lucky. Or maybe it's better at protecting its users from infection than Microsoft.

That said, if the built-in anti-virus protection in Windows 7 is as good as some earlier reviewers suggest. the security gap could close when Microsoft's new system finally launches next month.

Which may be why Apple is hammering home the "thousands of viruses" message now.

http://brainstormtech.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2009/09/02/why-are-there-no-mac-viruses/