Norton

[Buleste]

I like Norton and had it up until recently. The only reason I dropped it was because it's cheaper to buy a new version off the shelf than to renew your subscription which I find a load of *&$%. I'm now using AVG and Avast at the moment.

[Harrison]

Norton's has definitely improved a lot from the 2010 edition onwards when they completely rewrote it. However it is still bloatware, filling up way too much HDD space, and it still uses a lot of system resources, although it is now much better with CPU time than it was before. It is however still not the greatest at detecting threats, although it is higher up than AVG which is complete rubbish. So many people's laptops I've had to clean of virus infections have been running AVG thinking they were protected, but it was happily letting all sorts of things through, including some quite horrible viruses that pretended to be a virus checker themselves.

I personally still use a 3 license copy of Kaspersky and have been extermely happy with it. And for other systems I just the free Comodo Internet Security, which is the only free one I would recommend to people.

[J T]

I use MSE on all of our computers, and yeah it's OK. Nice and simple, unobtrusive and although I haven't looked in much detail, doesn't seem to slow things down too much.

I used to use Norton many years ago and it was a real bitch to remove when I wanted to switch.

[Harrison]

Oh, that is still true. It comes installed as 30 day trials on a lot of new laptops still and I'm sometimes asked by friends to remove it for them and install something free/better, and it takes a lot of effort to get rid of it all completely. It often installs things at system level that run as services when the system starts, so they can't be uninstalled because they are running, so they need manually disabling, which can cause Norton's to throw a fit because someone is tampering with its files. So into safe mode, disable nearly everything from loading, manual removal of everything... only way. Definitely not home user friendly in removing it.

[Demon Cleaner]

You have the Norton Removal Tool that pretty much does it's job.

[Buleste]

What on earth's happened to Comodo??? It's become bloatware!! You have to have Comodo Dragon and Geekbuddy if you want any of the products and I started the 30 day trial of the Internet Security (AV and Firewall) and it eats all my systems resources when it does a full scan!!!! Definitely not recommended for an older system like mine. 2 1/2 hours and it managed to scan 2% of my hard drive and it was impossible to do anything else whilst it was trying to scan.

I think I'll go with the double sock method and find another free AV to go with Avast.

[Harrison]

Did you download the right version?

http://www.comodo.com/home/internet-...t-security.php

I've installed this version only last week for someone and it didn't have Geekbuddy or Dragon with it. I think as you mentioned a 30 day trial, you downloaded the Pro paid for version. Just download the free one, and make sure you untick the options in one of the pages that installs advertisers extras like yahoo toolbar, and then it is perfectly fine. I have Comodo Internet Security running on older systems as old as an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1GB of ram and it runs perfectly well on there with no CPU resource hogging.

When I've seen a system scan do that with any security software in the past, a lot of the time there has been a bad infection on the system and the scanner locks up trying to deal with it and can't get past it, using 100% CPU.