Review by New England Yankee

Norton just may be the best of the AV suites available, but that doesn’t make it much more palatable. The software is a pain to install and worse to renew, has a major (negative) impact on performance, and is paternalistic to the max. Turn off anything - anything - in the suite, and you’ll never see the end of warning messages in your system tray warning you of Armegeddon, even with notifications turned off. From a protection standpoint, the software is pretty good, but by no means a panacea, and things do slip through. Personally, I suspect there are some memory leaks somewhere in the software, as my machine is unresponsive to the point of being unusable after a full system scan.

I went to an AV suite after running without one for years, but finally got hit with a virus that required reflashing and a ground-up rebuild. Given the performance problems running AV software, however, my current thinking is that I might be better off simply taking a conservative approach with data security and redoing the build once a month. Given that’s an immensely easier task on the Mac OS (more secure to begin with), I’m switching in the next couple of months. Norton and Vista aren’t my idea of better off.