Review by Sandy

Have revised my rating to 4 stars. It doesn’t do very well with non-Symantec firewalls. Or they don’t do well with it. Not sure which, but it can get expensive and annoying to run this with other companies’ software.

Because Norton has been getting such a thrashing lately, I thought I’d try other antivirus products. After trying several, I’ve come back to Norton. Yes, it’s a really big program and not suitable for everyone. I would never run it on an elderly machine unless masochism were my bag (baby). But, it’s a good program for anyone running XP on a relatively modern machine. I like having a standalone antivirus running alongside my standalone firewall. I also like having a standalone spyware scanner. In short, I like to run what I consider to be cream-of-the-crop applications and not have them get in each other’s ways. Norton unobrtrusively scans my mail, and it takes detailed activity log notes, and blocks/removes what it should.

I had no installation problems whatsoever. In fact, it was a snap to install and register. 2005 did very well at protecting me last year–no virus scanner turned any hidden anything up; I look forward to another year of surfing in safety. I didn’t notice a performance slowdown, either. And I definitely would have, having just compared other antivirus to Norton. It’s a tad slow at the scanning; but, guess what? So was everyone else. I wish they’d all scan quicker. Just ignore protection center alerts at first and let the software update and scan, and you’re in business.