Sean Wallbridge
Well, I don’t do much (preferably none) small business/home work but on corporate networks where they are installing 100’s and 1000’s of Norton, it crashes servers, is completely unreliable/unstable and even after you remove it, its still buried deep in the bowels of your PC.
But one thing I notice in 90% of the cases where I’ve removed Norton … is that the next AV product I put on (doesn’t matter which) will find 5-10 viruses on a machine where Norton was and didn’t find a virus. ie. its a false sense of security as it doesn’t catch everything … often…
…my issues with Norton also date back a few years (actually 7 or so) when I was tasked with evaluating 10 different AV products for the company I was working for. I had a test machine image with about a dozen viruses on it and only 7 out of 10 of the AV packages I tested found all of them. The three that failed were McAfee, Innoculan and the worst offender was Norton.
…read into that what you will… the best antivirus regardless is smart computing…
– don’t open messages from people you don’t know
– don’t use P2P file sharing software (Kazaa, Limewire, etc.) on a computer you care about
– do backups and store the media (tape, CD, whatever) away from your computer
– eBay hasn’t closed your account and Paypal doesn’t need to check your credit card details
– always run AV software but never count on it
– if you get infected with virus – format your computer. I don’t mean finding a virus, I mean a virus that actually causes harm on your computer (because you didn’t have AV or because the virus hit the wild before your AV software had an update). Just because the virus was removed, doesn’t mean the harm (or holes it poked) are gone… possibly making way to a bigger attack next time.
Whew, rant over… 😉