Good software, quicker than 2005.

I bought this after having Norton Systemworks 2005 for the past few years. After reading some of the negative reviews I was a bit apprehensive, but I went ahead and bought it anyway. I uninstalled 2005 with the Norton Removal Tool before installing. It runs very much quicker than my old 2005 version, but of course doesn't come with the system tools which I found I rarely used anyway, and they aren't things I couldn't do myself - they just cut the leg work a little. I'm using Win XP home SP2, Athlon64 3500+, 1 meg Ram and works like a dream.

Oh, and after the reading the review below I can confirm it does work with Firefox (for me anyway!).

Terrible- worse than bad

Followed suggested 'free' upgrade path from NIS 2007. Very bad move. Upgrade stalled with product not installed properly and a host of error messages on resart. Even Removal Tool stalling when I tried to use it to remove unsuccessful installation! Worst ever. I have been tiring of Norton (Symantec really)for a while now and this was last straw. I am going to try Kaspersky instead but worry its interface is more user intensive- we shall see. I really must say that this is one of the worst installs I have ever experienced, and that is many. Never got product working. Abysmal. Oh, and I already know tech/cust support is a complete waste of time and money. Time for this company to shape up or ship out. Truly disappointed.

do not use this

Had Norton, though it was slow.

got a brand new alienware top notch PC with XP pro.

Kapersky crashed windows within 2 minutes

I had to reinstall windows

stick to old slow Norton

Simple and Effective

I've been a loyal Norton user since I bought my first PC eight years ago, but I was getting increasingly frustrated with the ever-slower start-up times and found my 'trusted' security package to blame. I found Norton got slower and slower the nearer I got to the renewal date of my subscription. In previous years this has been a niggle, but this year my relatively new PC took a full 12 minutes from start-up to actually getting to my homepage.
After looking at various reviews online I went for Kaspersky 7. I'm no techie so some of the reviews were off-putting, especially the issues with customer services at Kaspersky when things went wrong. However, the price and the positive reviews by respectable web sites and magazines persuaded me to take the chance. I'm so glad I did! Installation was simple and although the initial scan took some hours, I simply ticked the box to switch off the PC when it had finished and went to bed. Job done! Updates have been discrete and well-managed, and the scans have picked up a few nasties Norton had happily left alone. I can't recommend this highly enough

This is wonderful.........

As I have started to seriously use the Internet to buy goods I downloaded Norton 360 2.0 trial from Symantec. I was so delighted with it that I have upgraded from Norton Anti Virus to the full Norton 360 2.0 program. I can't recommend it higher it works in the back ground with out my input after set up and I am especially delighted that the phishing protection is on FireFox not just IE. I know by earlier reviews of the original 360 (not 2.0) that there were problems with it. I have found none mind you I am using XP not Vista? My recommendation is buy it.

Simple no fuss anti-virus protection

One thing about Symantec products is they work, if you just want a good anti-virus scanner that is simple to use and that is simple to keep up to date then this is the answer. The user interface if minimal, allowing you to scan your drives individually or all at once as well as manually running the update program. Other than installing it and letting it run a full system scan every now and then there is nothing to do, the software runs in the background; along with the auto updater.

excellent and efficient, highly recommended

I have used Kaspersky Antivirus 7.0 on my Win XP notebook for about 8 weeks, after having had the Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 6.0 installed on my old Win 98 PC for some 2 years without any problems, switching from McAffee to ZoneAlarm and then to Kaspersky and I noticed a considerable improvement of PC performance on the old machine after switching to Kaspersky, which still runs ok on the P3 750Mhz machine. On the notebook I have not noticed any drain on systems ressources, while it works smoothly and effiently in the backgroung.
On switchin from ZoneAlarm on my old machine, KIS picked up a few problems which went undetected before and I have not had any infections since, running Adaware and Spybot on demand scans as well from time to time, and no virus/spyware problems on the new machine. Virus file updates are frequent, several times a day.

KAV 7.0 is no longer compatible with Spybot but shows no prolems with Adaware on demand scans, not that they ever pick anything up other than some cookies and low grade marketing scanners, and it runs alongside Win Defender without conflict, and, quite frankly, it does not seem to require any additional spyware scanner.

KAV 7.0 is explicitly not compatible with ZoneAlarm free Firewall. It does work with Comodo free Firewall 3.0, but there are reported conflicts with earlier Comodo versions and some user forums have brought up occasional issues between KAV 7.0 with full proactive defensive features on as well as Comodo with Defense+ running, but none when these are tweaked and finetuned, or either Defense+ or KAV proactive features disabled and both of them would seem a bit of an overkill anyway.
I have KAV 7.0 running alongside Comodo 3.0 with Defense+ enabled, without any problems so far and no noticeable effect on systems ressources.
There is an extensive list of software incompatible with KAV 7.0 on the Kaspersky website/userforum, which contains mainly other antivirus products, as expected, and a number of other applications, but there is still choice and I reckon from my research that KAV + Comodo should give one pretty much the best of both worlds. However, the Kaspersky firewall in KIS seems to be pretty good and effective in my own experience and from reviews and user forums and is clearly free of conflict.

In summary: high detection rate, low usage of ressources and my experience with customer/technical support has been positive.
Highly recommended!

VNUNet.com

Review Score: 5/5
User Score 5/5

As an experienced PC user you almost certainly have an antivirus tool already, but does it really deliver the features and performance you need? There are numerous AV options available, from thre free tools through to commercial editions from AV developer heavyweights, such as Symantec. So, what does AVG Anti-Virus do differently that enable the software to standout from other apps?

It all starts with a compact antivirus engine that won't swallow all your system resources. Our test PC saw the major AVG Anti-Virus components consume only around 4 MB of RAM when running in the background, for instance, and CPU utilisation is also very low, so most of the time you'll never even know the program is there.

The efficient approach pays off in scanning performance, with AVG Anti-Virus able to check your entire system at a very reasonable speed. Although if even that's not fast enough, you could set up a custom scan that would run much more quickly. The default System Areas Test, for example, checked commonly infected areas on our test PC in under 5 seconds.

Of course the real aim of AVG Anti-Virus is to prevent you getting infected in the first place, and so the program's Resident Shield looks for and blocks threats before they can be launched. It will scan your incoming and outgoing mail, too, and you can also schedule further scans to trap anything that manages to get by.

The latest AVG Anti-Virus 8 ships with anti-virus and anti-spyware support, as well as protection against rootkit and a webshield. This is the paid-for trial version.

Awful.

You'd think a company this successful could make anti-virus software that works. But no, it just removes necessary files from your computer, making it unusable. Go for AVG.

Appalling. Find another product.

I can only endorse and reinforce what a number of posters have written about this product. I have had Norton Internet Security installed on my system for a year. Two weeks before it was due to expire I suddenly found the package was catching intrusions on my PC and Internet connection every few minutes. Convenient! I resubscibed to Norton for £39.99. A couple of weeks later my PC was infected by a nasty virus. Norton failed to pick it up. A full system scan using Norton failed to find the virus. So, I contected Norton on their wonderfully user-unfriendly website. I was sent to an online chat room where I was essentially told that it was my fault the virus had hit my PC and that I must have done someting to cause the problem. I was then told I could pay £69.99 for a consultation to resolve the issue. I pointed out that if the security had done the job I had paid for I shouldn't need to pay extra. At which point the advisor said 'Thank you for your enquiry. Have a nice day,' and logged off. I sent an email to Norton to formally complain and four days later received a reply that said 'Sorry for your troubles', and that was about it. I have sent another formal complaint to Norton and will wait to see what response I get. I have had to download and pay for (as none of the free software could detect the virus) a different anti-spyware program, which did a full system scan in 2 minutes, found the virus and the files it had corrupted and removed the lot in 30 seconds.

Norton Internet Security does not protect you from some of the more malevolent viruses and the support offered by the company is non-existent and expensive. Don't waste your time or your money.

Don't be fooled

I purchased Norton 2004 and 2005 and became annoyed with the apparent drain on my PC's performance. So in 2006 I decided to try something different. After surfing the web I convinced myself that"Bitdefender" was worth a try. I was sadly mistaken. It was (in my opinion) worse than Norton. So, in 2007 I returned to Norton thinking"I guess the grass is not always greener". However, in the past few months my Windows XP machine has just started to crawl - the startup time (after Windows starts and you can actually do anything) is ridiculous and even the time certain apps take to start up (like Windows Explorer) is massive.

What's worse, 9 times out of 10, soon after I boot up, Norton crashes with an"Auto Protect Error". I have searched the web and this is NOT uncommon. And the best of it is - there is no solution to it?!? All Symantec do is force you to make sure your virus definitions are up to date and then restart. In reality they just want you to restart but know that you need to feel as if you have done something.

I was foolish to come back to Norton and if you are even considering then please, learn from my mistake, don't bother. I am going to try AVG next - I have read very good things particularly about the amount of system resources it uses.

cfctlcom.exe error messages crashes runs very slowly

I have been using PC-Cillin since version 2005, and have used version 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Version 2008 runs very slowly even on 750MB ram. It crashes with cfctlcom.exe error messages once two days approx.

Tech support website obviously was no help. There is no option for the above scenario at all. Email replies from trend gave standard instructions to Uninstall use their cleaners and reinstall that made no difference - Afterall I was a longstanding customer using their product to upgrade to the next version! -HUH!

I have two options go back to 2007 or try another Antivius

This is a shame.

This is surely not the answer for protection on joint Mac/Windows running?

The issue of likely growing interest in viruses being written for attacks on Macs is an accident waiting to happen - as Mac User magazine (11th April 2008) recently wrote the fact pattern with growing use of Mac computers means that in their estimation 2008 will be the year the Mac hackers finally break through and recent experiments at the CanSecWest security conference demonstrated in an open competition between hackers how easy this is!

The problem with this offering is that it is Mac OS specific and so a system covering the Windows"side" if that is your set up through using Boot Camp or more likely Parallels or a comparable system on the same computer is left open to viruses. For such joint users this product will be of minimal value I concluded when researching to buy such protection!

Good - with a few quirks

I have used Norton/Symantec for several years now, and though this is one of the best (functionality wise) it does have a few quirks that drive me bonkers.
Install was easy, worked first time and was quick. Advice is to let it complete the full system scan when you're done for the day (takes about an hour or so). Some people say that it causes their PC to run slowly - this is purely to do with the spec of the PC. Mine is absolutely fine - no change from previous version (I have a pretty mean machine, mind). When I installed it on my laptop, then I suffered from slow network connection and download. So, definately spec - not a software issue.
One thing though, that drives me loopy, is for some reason this software does not automatically refresh web pages. It's a cache monster. This is especially apparent on my hotmail account, and some online ordering pages. I'm forever deleting things, that appear when I return to the original page. I have to manually refresh to update the page. This is mildly annoying, to say the least.
Apart from that it's pretty good on my PC.
If you have a good spec PC/laptop, then this software is not a problem. If you are on a lower spec then you will find life a drag (I disable it on my laptop when downloading and use the Windows Firewall).
I think with all the horror stories people feel the NEED to buy this type of security software - but to be honest, buying your own firewall, or using another software solution is just as good as Norton (and some others are less resource hungry !!).