1 stars (Norton Internet Security is a complete waste of time & money.) - I purchased Norton and I have always used Norton as my anti-virus and firewall. I purchased Norton (again) last year and will not be renewing my subscription this year.
This product is a joke.
It completely slows down my laptop without reason (laptop is a high end IBM), it sends out a million messages for no apparent reasons and keeps asking to be un-installed and re-installed because one function or another is not working. Symantec really need to fix this software or lose all their customers.
2 stars (The anti-virus component might be OK, but the rest is buggy.) - Norton anti-virus at some point was the best anti-virus program, then it started going down hill and especially when they bundled this other useless (trash-ware) Internet security components. I am an above average computer user. This product is not worth the money. It is probably best to spend the money on just the anti-virus alone if that is still any good. When I installed this program it slowed down my 550 MHz system. If I try to send an email with an attachment it timed out (poor programing) because it scans the outgoing mail and it is also supposed to "train" its anti-spam engine, which is by the way useless, a simple OE filter catches more spam than it ever hopes to. I have DSL so it is not a bandwidth or timeout issue like Symantec would like you to believe, it is simply that Norton acts as the mail server for your email client but acts less than that due to poor or incomplete programing. Symantec's website is not much help on this big defect in the program. The solution that I discovered after days of trial and error is to disable the scanning of the outgoing email all together, this applies to the email scanning of outgoing messages and the filtering/training in the anti-spam options (so much for paying the extra for the Internet security features that have to be disabled in most cases unless you are just sending plain text emails.) The timeout prevention settings provided by the program in a couple of places is ineffective (I wonder if they are just there as dummy features, because they do not seem to affect things one way or the other!) It is sad to see another good name go down the drain; Now I wonder whether the anti-virus portion is effective or not!!
Once my subscription expires, I may go with eTrust's EZ Anti-virus and Zone Alarm or McAfee's anti-virus and Zone Alarm(which was the best a long time ago then became buggy once bundled in a suit, but now might have improved.)
5 stars (Norton Internet Security) - This is the premier internet protection program on the market. Getting an anti-virus program is pointless because this program has it all. Highly recommended. |
