Norton 360 v4.0 Premiere

[outlawal2]

As a PC support guy both hardware and software, I can tell you why people steer clear of Norton... I cannot tell you how many machines I have had to rebuild due to Norton "Activation" issues... They have the worst activation and subscription service I have ever dealt with. More often than not even Norton themselves cannot fix the subscription problems and cannot even uninstall their own software. Reminds me of AOL many years back that would take over the system and had no way to remove. (They later got their asses sued off due to these types of issues and I think Norton should as well.) Norton often requires a complete machine rebuild to fix the issue and in todays' world that is just unacceptable. I belive Harrison said that the new version supposedly fixes these issues and I certanly hope so... But for my money I will not take a chance on their shoddy software when there are so many alternative options out there...

Just my opinion... Good luck with whatever choice you make..

[Demon Cleaner]

Just my opinion... Good luck with whatever choice you make..

Would you than suggest something in particular? F. ex. sticking with free software, like Avast and Comodo Firewall (which I use atm)?

I read that Norton still has problems when you try to remove the software, and I had these problems back then too, but I found a Norton removal tool, which did the job quite good.

[outlawal2]

BitDefender receives consistent good marks and I have had many customers that swear by it... If I were in the market I would try Bit Defender...

[Demon Cleaner]

Ok, I will investigate that further tomorrow.

[Demon Cleaner]

Ok, I installed the trial version of Norton 360 v4 to make a test. Today, 2 days later, I'm already removing it because I have some issues. I cannot run "Live Update", I always get the message that I can't connect to the Symantec server. First I thought that would be a problem of my laptop, not making the connection correctly, but it wasn't. This seems to be a more common problem. Searched for support on the Symantec site, found several help to fix this problem, tried all of them, none of course worked. As the problem still remained unsolved, I decided to get rid of it.

Testing BitDefender next I think.

---------- Post added at 13:59 ---------- Previous post was at 12:43 ----------

Installed BitDefender Total Security now, seems to work, gonna wait some days before giving my final opinion. I also found a nice patch for BD, applied it, and it gives me free usage until 2047!! Nice!! It also seems to work, I updated, nothing changed.

[Demon Cleaner]

It seems that with BitDefender I have exactly the same problem with the databases update than with Norton, so that was eventually not Norton's fault, but I'm quite sure now that it could have something to do with my laptop. Don't know what though, as I can connect to the internet perfectly, although only via 3G, but that was always enough so far.

EDIT: Found out what the problem was. Avast and Comodo were still installed, although not active and not started with Windows, they were disabled. After now removing them, the update just went fine. Perhaps something of these programs still was running silently in the background.

Now I feel bad about having removed Norton, as that must have been the same problem

[Submeg]

As a PC support guy both hardware and software, I can tell you why people steer clear of Norton... I cannot tell you how many machines I have had to rebuild due to Norton "Activation" issues... They have the worst activation and subscription service I have ever dealt with. More often than not even Norton themselves cannot fix the subscription problems and cannot even uninstall their own software. Reminds me of AOL many years back that would take over the system and had no way to remove. (They later got their asses sued off due to these types of issues and I think Norton should as well.) Norton often requires a complete machine rebuild to fix the issue and in todays' world that is just unacceptable. I belive Harrison said that the new version supposedly fixes these issues and I certanly hope so... But for my money I will not take a chance on their shoddy software when there are so many alternative options out there...

Just my opinion... Good luck with whatever choice you make..

Hmm, interesting!

I guess for me, I always have had my laptop connected to the net, so I've had no need to remove it. I can't say that I've ever experienced that issue. Interesting that it is such an issue though.

But in terms of protection, how would you rate it/ what do you think is the best? That's what I'm looking for, as for me, I haven't had issues with installation, activation or updates...

[Demon Cleaner]

Ok, some updates. I removed BitDefender again from my main PC and my laptop, it had an annoying major problem, which seems to be common. It asks you in the beginning if you want to perform a deep scan, meaning a full scan of all existing files on your disks. Problem is first of all that this takes very long, I had to stop it on my laptop after 6 hours because I wanted to switch it off, I use it here at work, and don't want to leave it outside on my desk over night.

But every time now I turn the laptop on, it starts with the deep scan task immediately, you can stop it manually, but after every restart, it starts from scratch. There's no way (at least I couldn't find whilst searching nor on the internet) to stop it from doing it, and there's also no option to tell it that you don't want to do a deep scan at all. It then always shows you an error message that this task has never been completed. So far so good, I could live with that message, but guess what happens again after the next restart!!

On my main PC I let it finish the deep scan, which took some days because my 10TB disks already contain millions of files. As that system is running 24/7, I just let it finish. Once done I was really happy, because also during the deep scan your PC suffers slowdowns. But then, after 30 days, it wants to do the whole operation again, and again it shows you the error message all the time if you're not doing it, and of course again it starts the deep scan every time you restart your PC.

This was after some time annoying me really much so that I decided to remove the whole software. Now I'm again working with Avast and Comodo.

[Harrison]

I know you had some problems with Kaspersky, but I've just upgrades last month to the latest Kaspersky Security Suite 2011 and it is improved on previous versions. You don't even notice it is there unless a thread is detected, and it doesn't have any annoying warning to do full scans as you have been getting. It just warns you that it hasn't been performed in a message box if you open the main main window. Other than that it is never seen and just sits in the background working.

[Demon Cleaner]

I could perhaps test Kaspersky on my laptop, then I would have tested most of them But I should do that anyway before buying some stuff straight away only based on good reviews, I think you will always have to see for yourself. Is there a trial version of the Security Suite, I only find a trial for Internet Security, but perhaps that will already do the job, mainly only needing a good antivirus and a firewall. What is the difference between these 2?