Norton has Fallen. Review on Norton AntiVirus

Time was you always upgraded your Norton Anti-Virus each year. It was a bit of a ritual but I'm here to tell you that times have changed. I used the latest Norton Anti-Virus 2004 for a month and returned it to the good and very cooperative folks at Office Depot. Then, for some odd reason, Symantec sent me an e-mail and asked me to beta test their next generation program, Norton Anti-Virus 2005. I did so and have now erased all traces of each of them off of my PC.

Here's the thing - it's not that Norton doesn't provide excellent protection - it does, no doubt about it, however at what cost? I'll tell you the cost - it's your system resources. The 2004 version would routinely bring my fairly current system to its virtual knees. Now, this is because the program is trying to do the right thing. It now scans within compressed files AS they are being downloaded instead of waiting until they've nestled into the confines of your file system. Great idea but lousy execution.

Oh - virtually everything I writing about 2004 is true of 2005. The differences are minor and I'll briefly detail the new bits in 2005 at the end.

A good example of very silly coding is how the program handled a large number of JPEG files, after they have been viewed. Using ACDSee to view a large group of pictures was fine; until I closed the program...only then did Norton proceed to freeze the entire system as it laboriously scanned each and every picture. If you open a folder with say 1,000 photos in it, you best be prepared to go get a cup of tea or coffee and learn macramé from a local community center as you wait for the machine to complete its AFTER THE FACT scan.

Oh my ? the horror. the horror.

Anyway, the program does a top notch job of protecting your system from bad nastiness but you see, that?s the thing?you can use other programs?one that is free?that does as good a job. I am now using Avast (available at https://avast.com) and it uses virtually no system resources, updates itself every day and scans all compressed files, e-mail as well as messaging programs, such as Yahoo Instant Messenger, MSN Messenger and AOL AIM. (It will also handle Trillian if you use that to combine all of these IM programs into one neat package.) Best of all, Avast is free to non-commercial users.

What?s new in 2005? Well, it adds some Anti-Spyware capabilities and also bugs you to use your firewall...or rather the Norton Firewall product. There isn?t a lot different in the 2005 iteration but it is just as slow and resource hogging.

And another warning. I had Norton SystemWorks 2003 on my machine when I upgraded to 2004 and then to 2005. Well, 2004 and 2005 forced me to uninstall SystemWorks. That wasn?t a deal killer as I had recently found a MUCH better disk defragger; PerfectDisk and the Norton Utilities were frankly a bit long in the tooth for WinXP. The problem was the SystemWorks did not completely uninstall. When I finally decided to rid myself of all things Norton, I found that it was almost impossible to pry bits and services out of my machine. Luckily I know my way around the registry and was able to root it all out manually but for the average user what this would mean is that even if you uninstalled the silly program or programs, it leaves certain services still running...and consequently using system resources. You can see this if you peruse Windows XP System Services viewer in the System Administrator section.

So that?s it. Norton is bloated as a poor dead pooch on a Texas highway in August, and trust me that?s not a pretty sight. And here?s a bonus observation?McAfee is worse! I tried McAfee due to a rebate that corrupted my normally innocent self but found that McAfee and Microsoft Outlook don?t play well together. This is especially true if you have to e-mail a large file. I had to send several large PDF?s and a couple of AutoCAD drawings and McAfee froze my system and wouldn?t ever let them go. Even worse, I had to reboot to unfreeze the system and the files were deleted. Bad McAfee...and I?ve heard this from several folks I correspond with. It might not affect a large number of you but once again?why pay for bloated, poorly coded monstrosities when you can use a really sharp program like Avast?

Good luck friends.