Yet more reasons not to use Norton.
Norton is getting worse and worse with every new release. In fact, these days most hard hitting worms and viruses flat out target NAV and disable it. So despite best efforts to stay on top of things, they are becoming less and less effective as their market share grows.
Don’t even start me on their Installation/Upgrade issues. Most of the troubleshooting articles in their knowledge base look pretty much like this:
- Run Live Update
- If that does not work, try the online repair tool
- Try to reinstall Norton (this probably wont solve a thing)
- We have no clue what is wrong - you will just have to buy and install the newest version of the app
But that’s not even the worst part. The most worrisome aspect of Norton is the bloat! Most commercial AV solutions seem to be suffering from a bloat factor, but no where is this as visible as in Norton Internet Security Suite. It just seems to be getting out of hand lately. In fact, last time when I looked up resource hog in a dictionary I could swear I saw the Symantec logo right next to the definition. 
But is Norton really that bad? Hey, don’t take my word for it. ThePCSpy.com actually conducted a test measuring the boot times and system response delays after installing various popular applications. Norton was the undisputed “winner” of the test, ranking highest in both the the boot time, and response delay categories:
The control (barebones) installation would have mean boot time of 75 seconds. After installing Norton Internet Security 2006 the mean would go up to 118.33 seconds. They also recorded a 57.78% increase system response delay. Ugh!
Unfortunately they did not release any in depth description of the test procedure used to gather this data, so I’m not 100% confident in the validity of their results. (I was wrong - the procedure is posted on the page - see the comments. Sorry). Judging from my personal experiences with Symantec products these numbers seem about right.
Related Posts:
September 11th, 2006 at 5:41 am (1113) [Quote]
>> Unfortunately they did not release any in depth description of the test procedure used to gather this data
Yes I did…
http://www.thepcspy.com/articles/other/what_slows_windows_down/1
But to make you happy, I’ll include a lot of screenshots detailing the process when I do the next batch.
Posted usingSeptember 11th, 2006 at 10:55 am (1114) [Quote]
Oops! I guess I totally skipped over that section of the paper.
Sorry - my bad.
Great job testing this stuff btw!
Posted usingSeptember 11th, 2006 at 12:36 pm (1115) [Quote]
I wounder what inspired this rant, =)
http://community.livejournal.com/geeks/1075519.html
I’ll be getting to replacing it ASAP.
Posted usingSeptember 11th, 2006 at 2:35 pm (1119) [Quote]
It was meeeeee! Wohoo!
Wait, was it?
Posted usingSeptember 12th, 2006 at 12:35 pm (1127) [Quote]
we briefly had norton internet security ‘05 on our slightly crappy old desktop (poor thing only has 128mb of ram..) and it made it near impossible to use - [i]everything[/i] took about 10 times longer than it did before.
Now uninstalled and it works fine
Posted usingnorton = bloat QED