(no subject)

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

DEAR NORTON.

DO NOT QUIT YOUR DAY JOB.

Comments

[andrewx.livejournal.com]

that is his day job, unfortunatly.

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

nah, he's pretty good at making virus scanners.

Firewalls, on the other hand..

TMI about utilities...

[jecook]

I think he did that quite a long time ago.

The only real utility I use anymore that Peter Norton could claim to have any hand in is Disk doctor, only because it's a decent utility for recoving information from damaged floppy drives. Even then, it's woefully out of date, and refuses to have anything to do with NTFS.

Ghost is not one of his projects, it was an purchased product from Binary Research. That product rocks, I might add. Partition Magic (and Server Magic, it's twin brother) were both products of Powerquest before Symantec bought them out.

NAV is ok, except for the fact that you have to pay them some $35 a year for protection. There's cheaper out there that does a "decent enough" job. (In any case, I'm starting to lean back to Mcafee. I think they've learned that a web bases product is useless without a high speed connection...)

The defragger built into XP is acceptable for mere mortals. If you need anything better, I hear Diskeeper does the trick (in fact, the built in defragger is based off their code, IIRC)

And the "secure erase" stuff? There's free software which performs to or better then DoD specs. (DBAN for whole disk ops, eraser for individual files. Both are GPL licensed)

Software firewalls suck. I personaly don't use them beyond the built in one bundled with Service Pack 2. I have a hardware firewall for that. Script blocking? Dump IE, and use Firefox. Besides, if you are intent on visint "those sites", you ought to be using something Non-IE anyhow, because it's pop-up/under hell.

[d0rx0r.livejournal.com]

I don't trust anything norton related. It likes to get in deep.

Re: TMI about utilities...

[gholam.livejournal.com]

NAV is crap, because it's directly and intelligently targeted by many threats - worms know how to avoid it, and kill it. Spybot S&D has been suffering from the same problem lately, there's something - I haven't yet been able to pin down what exactly - that causes it to report system is clean without scanning anything. In addition, each succeeding version of NAV is more and more of a resource hog. A damn control panel app should NOT take half a minute to open on a fresh, mid-range to high-end system. SAV is better, but not by much. Me, I actually like the paid version of AVG.

[jcaswell.livejournal.com]

Heh. I thought you meant Graham Norton, and wondered what he'd done now. I'd even read all the comments before I realised what community this was in :)

Re: TMI about utilities...

[jarad.livejournal.com]

The one thing I absoloutely loathe is NAV's email scanner. Whatever way it works, it seems to somehow hook into the system and redirect all attempts to connect to port 25/110 to it's own SMTP/POP3 service that acts as a pass through to the real SMTP/POP3 server. I've confirmed this by traffic sniffing the connections... Outlook will report that it's sent the email, but in reality Norton has buffered it and is checking for viruses before it sends it on to the server.

Anywho, this means it frequently causes me two major problems.

(a) The first one is caused by the user sending a hyooge-ass email on a slow computer. Norton takes so long to scan that the mail server - seeing no traffic coming to it - times out.

(b) The second is caused by Norton throwing an absoloute wobbly and locking up, and so it doesn't connect to the real mail server, and the user gets all those lovely Outlook-based "Contact your mail server admin" messages. The only fix is to reboot.

Of course, figuring it out is only half the battle. You've then got to convince people that it's their NAV that's causing the problem and they need to reboot (or buy a faster machine). Do they listen? Noooo... Outlook says it's the mail server so it has to be the mail server.

Did I mention that disabling it in the Norton control panel isn't good enough? It still proxy's the connections on you even if Norton is killed dead and the antivirus is disabled to hell and back...

[lions-tambua.livejournal.com]

Norton has a job ?
i mean... all norton products i EVER tried, still giving me bad dreams. stop norton! better yesterday than tomorrow! :)

Re: TMI about utilities...

[ghostdandp.livejournal.com]

a few viruses actually act as there own SMTP clients, thats why it redirects. But I do agree, it takes too much time to redirect.

Well for me...

[kingginger.livejournal.com]

...Norton does not cause me a single problem.

I'm very happy with the Symantec range of products.

And I use them at home, business and enterprise environment.

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

We've been having an assload of trouble recently with people getting the web upgrades to their new 2006 products outright hosing their products (updating from 2004-5). Sometimes all the way to full reloads. Pissing us off too, especially cause they're just referring their customers to us to clean up their mess. Fuck 'em all.

Re: TMI about utilities...

[jecook]

Confirmed. My aunt and uncle had an older version of NAV (2001), and every now and again a malformed spam message would cause the mail proxy to choke.
I ultimately got them off the upgrade treadmill on those older machines.

Re: Well for me...

[jecook]

I happen to like the Norton Corporate edition for A/V. I've _never_ had a single problem with it. the only reason why we are not using it here at company ---- is because it would be a HUGE expense and headache to switch A/V clients. (most of our machines are out in the field, and have no direct connection to the company network)

Ghost and Partition Magic are in my personal toolkit for system maintainace, except that both of those were "purchased" additions to symantec's lineup.

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

"Everyone on their feet! Now stay standing...stay standing, if you've ever had severe problems with Symantec products!" ;-)

[codedigital.livejournal.com]

i hope that's not your breast.

Re: Well for me...

[spaz-own-joo.livejournal.com]

roughly 40% of the support calls I get [i'm a cable modem support operator] are from people whose internet connections have been broken by Norton Internet Security or Norton Personal Firewall.

[akage.livejournal.com]

AVG in da hizzouse.

Props to the Czechs at Grisoft for putting out a scanner that, since 2003 at least, has been as effective or occasionally *more* effective than SAV/NAV. With about a tenth of the overhead and a whole lot less invasiveness.

AVG and Kaspersky are the only AV tools that touch my machines, after all the headaches I've had with Symantec.