Virus Protection
Maybe it's because I've been coughing lately, but I've been seeing a lot of complaints about virus protection programs recently. Specifically, Norton, though many people are annoyed with the product group as a whole.
I gave up on Norton a few iterations ago. I found NAV had become bloated and intrusive, eating up system resources and interfering with routine tasks. Admittedly, we are supposed to temporarily shut down virus protection when installing new programs, for example, but I found that my applications were running like molasses all the time, hang ups and reboots becoming more frequent. Getting rid of NAV did the trick.
Time was, if someone wanted to know what virus protection to use, "Norton or McAfee" was the simple, safe answer.
Today, complaints about these products abound. Not the least of the complaints is help desk assistance - bad to non-existent, even when you pay the hefty fee for extra support.
A sampling of complaints:
"Having been a loyal NAV user for many years, I finally gave up with NAV 2007. After many hours of trying to upgrade from 2006 to 2007, including using all those specialized uninstall/install tools from the Norton website, I never did get NAV 2007 to install correctly (Windows XP with SP2)."
"It's a *huge* resource hog. My computer was pretty much worthless for at least a minute after login due to NAV's virus scanning."
"All Symantec wants you to do is bait you into installing their crappy software (which you won't EVER be able to uninstall). They will give you a 15-day trial, and then try to rip you off $40 bucks at the end of the trial period. It will shamelessly destroy your Windows Installer baseline package in the name of security while hideously removing the ability to install or uninstall any application including NAV.
DO NOT INSTALL THIS SOFTWARE unless you are looking forwarding to formatting your c:, got it? "
Similar problems have been reported with McAfee's virus protection products, though a cursory read-through of complaints indicate they're more likely to involve other specific programs the user is trying to run.
In general, a good set of rules for choosing and running virus protection:
- Always run something, it's better than not running some form of virus protection
- Don't try to run more than one product simultaneously
- Uninstall with caution!
- Do turn virus protection off when trying to install software
Some user-recommended alternatives to The Big Two:
The Shield Deluxe CA Antivirus BitDefender Kaspersky 6.0 F-Secure
Except for F-Secure, which runs a little higher, these products are generally available for about $40.
Maybe it's because I've been coughing lately, but I've been seeing a lot of complaints about virus protection programs recently. Specifically, Norton, though many people are annoyed with the product group as a whole.
I gave up on Norton a few iterations ago. I found NAV had become bloated and intrusive, eating up system resources and interfering with routine tasks. Admittedly, we are supposed to temporarily shut down virus protection when installing new programs, for example, but I found that my applications were running like molasses all the time, hang ups and reboots becoming more frequent. Getting rid of NAV did the trick.
Time was, if someone wanted to know what virus protection to use, "Norton or McAfee" was the simple, safe answer.
Today, complaints about these products abound. Not the least of the complaints is help desk assistance - bad to non-existent, even when you pay the hefty fee for extra support.
A sampling of complaints:
"Having been a loyal NAV user for many years, I finally gave up with NAV 2007. After many hours of trying to upgrade from 2006 to 2007, including using all those specialized uninstall/install tools from the Norton website, I never did get NAV 2007 to install correctly (Windows XP with SP2)."
"It's a *huge* resource hog. My computer was pretty much worthless for at least a minute after login due to NAV's virus scanning."
"All Symantec wants you to do is bait you into installing their crappy software (which you won't EVER be able to uninstall). They will give you a 15-day trial, and then try to rip you off $40 bucks at the end of the trial period. It will shamelessly destroy your Windows Installer baseline package in the name of security while hideously removing the ability to install or uninstall any application including NAV.
DO NOT INSTALL THIS SOFTWARE unless you are looking forwarding to formatting your c:, got it? "
Similar problems have been reported with McAfee's virus protection products, though a cursory read-through of complaints indicate they're more likely to involve other specific programs the user is trying to run.
In general, a good set of rules for choosing and running virus protection:
- Always run something, it's better than not running some form of virus protection
- Don't try to run more than one product simultaneously
- Uninstall with caution!
- Do turn virus protection off when trying to install software
Some user-recommended alternatives to The Big Two:
Except for F-Secure, which runs a little higher, these products are generally available for about $40.
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