Fucking Norton!!

[Lord Zentei]

So I descided to take heed of the annoying popups from WinXP about there being inadequate Virus protection on my computer, and purchased Norton Antivirus (those of you in the know are probably snickering already. Bastards). Anyway, as soon as this is done, the computer starts acting up, freezing for no apparent reason, operating like molasses moves and generally being screwy. An abridged conversation I subsequently had with my brother:


ME: Goddamn computer has been acting funky.

BRO: Yeah?

ME: Yeah, ever since I installed Norton Anti---

BRO: No! D'oh.

ME: Huh?

BRO: Dude, do not use that crap!

ME: What is up with it? And why does it make my computer shitty?

BRO: Yeah, 'cause you just installed, like, the BloatWare from HellTM

ME: What should I use then? Lets see, I had a recommended list here someplace...

BRO: <sigh> Get a Mac.


And there you have it. Norton is garbage that kills. FOR THE LOVE OF DOG, DON'T LET YOUR CHILDREN USE THIS SHIT!!!

[Arrow]

Go to www.avast.com, and download the free home-edition of their anti-virus software. Its far superior to Norton (except avast's default interface skin, but two betters are included). And try to get your money back on Norton.

We installed a copy on a machine work, and compared it to Norton (we have a 2001 corperate edition), and the difference in terms of performance and reliability is scary. Enough to make ditch Norton for my home computers. And we (meaning my two coworkers that got suckered into IT duties) are trying to convince the management to switch to Avast, but that's an uphill battle...

Edit: You know, this post sounds a lot like ad-spam. Sorry about that.

[General Zod]

AVG is another good free anti-virus program. Provides all the functionality with none of the bloat.

[Lord Zentei]

Edit: You know, this post sounds a lot like ad-spam. Sorry about that.

Hey, no sweat. I was half hoping for some ideas for better software among the joking around.

[Durandal]

Lately, Norton's software has caused more problems than it solves. Back when Norton Utilities was at 2.0 or so, it was the King of All Utilities on the old Mac OS and Windows. Now it's bloated garbage.

[phongn]

Symantec's corporate solutions remain pretty good, alas, their consumer products are crap.

[atg]

I get at least 5 calls a week at work that go like this:
"I installed norton and the net doesn't work"

Namely Norton Internet Security firewall is farking their connection.

Then there was the time when a customer had gotten Norton to block it's own updating service....... which caused Norton to have a fit about being out of date and not being able to connect to the live update service. You would expect Norton(the program) would think "hmmm, i've just been told to block a critical component of myself, nope, not going to do it." Noooooooo.

On top of that it's just a bloated peice of crap that can make a 4800+ processor seem slow, the developers should be hung for releasing such a pile of crap.

[Master of Ossus]

Norton's security "solution" is about a million times worse than the disease. I installed it a couple of years ago on one of my machines... until I found out that it was consistently eating 20-40% of the CPU time, and a significant fraction of the total RAM, as well.

[phongn]

Norton's firewall does stupid stuff like block localhost<->localhost connections, which some programs use for interprocess communications. It's junk.

[General Brock]

Symantec scraps Sygate consumer firewall

By Joris Evers
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: November 28, 2005, 4:41 PM PST


One month after closing the Sygate Technologies takeover, Symantec is cutting the Sygate Personal Firewall products because of overlap with the Norton Personal Firewall.

The Sygate Personal Firewall and Sygate Personal Firewall Pro products will no longer be available effective Nov. 30, Symantec spokesman Phil Weiler said Monday. Consumers will receive special upgrade pricing when they buy a replacement product from Symantec’s Norton family of Internet security products, he said.

By pulling the Sygate Personal Firewall, Symantec is further reducing the options for people looking for a free firewall for their computer. Sygate offered the Sygate Personal Firewall at no cost and sold Sygate Personal Firewall Pro. Kerio Technologies has previously said it will discontinue its desktop firewall at the end of this year.

"While the Sygate products complement our enterprise offerings, there was an overlap on the consumer side of the business. After looking at the Sygate Personal Firewall technology we decided to discontinue the products and continue selling Norton Personal Firewall," Weiler said.

The Sygate Personal Firewall was downloaded more than 3.6 million times from CNET Download.com, a division of CNET Networks, the publisher of News.com.

Consumers looking for a free firewall still have options. These include Zone Labs' Zone Alarm, Microsoft's Windows Firewall and Jetico.

Symantec will continue to support and develop the Sygate enterprise product portfolio, including Symantec Sygate Enterprise Protection, Symantec Sygate On-Demand, Symantec Sygate Embedded and Symantec Sygate Network Access Control, Weiler said.

Symantec announced the takeover of Fremont, Calif.-based Sygate in August. The deal was closed in October.

CNet News: Sygate closed forever

Symantec is teh eeeevil. I learned that here, BTW; I don't know how you missed all the anti-Norton posts.

Anyway, if you can't get your money back, perhaps run a registry cleaner then defrag. Check the disk usage and System Restore to see if anything looks unusual there; the version you are using might backing itself up excessively.

I used to run Norton, but switched to AVG when the subscription ran out. Norton is an adequate antivirus, but AVG definitely seems more effective as well as more efficient, and it dosen't seem tied to IE for updating.

You seem to be using the +firewall edition, which I am unfamiliar with. Norton will probably will 'upgrade' their firewall to something Sygate-ish soon, once issues of who gets paid propriety royalties gets straightened out.

[Pu-239]

*snip*

Agreed.

[darthdavid]

Some people might jump on me for this, but I don't see a big need for virus protection.

Before I made the full switch to Linux last year, I have used Microsoft Windows 95 and later 98 for about 7 years. 5 of those years on dial up and one on broadband. Only once did I or my mother, who also used that computer, ever get any kind of infection at all, and that one was actually spyware gotten due to my carelessness.

I simply nuked the system partition from high orbit and restored from a shadow partition I had on my spare had drive.

That was with Windows 98 using Internet Explorer 5, in a moderatly locked down state. Nowadays, you have much more protection built right into your operating system and superior web browsing software. Taking a few simple steps with Windows XP will protect you.

First, disable crap like ActiveX controls in your browser. If you use Firefox, that is a non issue, but with IE that is the biggest security hole I know of.

Second and most importantly, don't run strange programs. Especially as an administrator.

Third, which some people and programs don't like, create a limited account for yourself for every day use. As a limited user, any programs you run will be unable to affect the core operating system. This stops most viruses and spyware dead, and if they are not stopped entirely, it seriously limits the damage they can do.


The biggest thing to remember is a little common sense will go a long way. Keep CD or DVD backups of anything really important just in case, and don't run strange programs.

Virus scanners are more trouble than they are worth.

Except for the fact that if you'd have had a virus and/or spy/malware scanner you wouldn't have even gotten that one worm and wouldn't have had to spend time nuking your HDD. Also, there's lots of stuff that's very stealthy and that you won't even be able to tell you have unless you have a virus scanner or spend so much time prowling through your registry and any place else a virus might care to mess with that you'd be exspending much less time if you just got a virus scanner in the first place.

[Glocksman]

I've had good luck with Eset's NOD32 antivirus.
Small, fast, unobtrusive and highly rated.
They have a full featured 30 day trial version available for download.
Norton and Kaspersky are resource hogs.

[Faram]

My fav is F-Secure, cheap easy and no bloat.

[Stark]

I use nod32.

Anyone who spends any time on p2p networks needs virus scanners. I trust my scanner enough to download files I'm almost certain are actually viruses, just so I can see the big 'holy snap that's a virus don't let it run' window pop up.

[Arrow]

Hell, I found a virus last week that came in through the JAVA updater!!!! Running without virus protection is just stupid, its the computer equilivant of "I can pull out in time!".

[Zac Naloen]

I keep getting that java installer update, i have no idea how to stop it.

[Elheru Aran]

One of the truly excruciating annoyances of using the school network is I have to deal with their requirements... I have to use either Norton, McAffee, or Trend Micro. No other options permitted. The network's software will periodically scan your computer to ascertain whether or not you maintain that antivirus and it'll blast you if you don't update it.

Fucking college IT...

[Lord Zentei]

Not only was there the egrariousness of the shitty performance problems but also the small fact that when I installed it, Norton Anti Virus actually switched off the firewall that came with Windows - even though I was not also installing a Norton firewall. Why the hell would it need to do that? Of course, I switched it back on again as soon as I noticed this, but seriously, WTF?

[Admiral Valdemar]

Hell, I found a virus last week that came in through the JAVA updater!!!! Running without virus protection is just stupid, its the computer equilivant of "I can pull out in time!".

I got that too, in fact, I deleted it once then AVG7 found it again. But it didn't bother doing anything as the app. was in a zip archive, and so totally useless unless I was dumb enough to install it myself. Which I'm not.

[Einhander Sn0m4n]

Hell, I found a virus last week that came in through the JAVA updater!!!! Running without virus protection is just stupid, its the computer equilivant of "I can pull out in time!".

I got that too, in fact, I deleted it once then AVG7 found it again. But it didn't bother doing anything as the app. was in a zip archive, and so totally useless unless I was dumb enough to install it myself. Which I'm not.

Looks like a CoolWebSearch attack. I get those on both boats at least twice a month, always on Dave's profile too. The CWS attacks always fail due to my using Sun Java and Firefox.

[Edi]

My parents newly bought computer got an immediate software update in the form of orbital nuking all the Norton shit that came installed with it. It's fucking retarded, that piece of shit malware wouldn't let non-admin users view any secure web pages that used the HTTPS protocol. Once the Norton shit was removed and AVG and another firewall installed, no problems whatsoever. My brother later changed the AV software to Avast on it.

Symantec's consumer software, as stated is complete shit. It's bad enough to be outright fucking malware instead of just software with a few bugs in it.

Edi