Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 6-10 of 187
 God help you if you buy this... February 25, 2008
Eduardo Nietzsche (Houston)
37 out of 38 found this review helpful
...unless you have some super-duper computer system (Quad or Dual Core Processor, at least 2.0GHz processor speed, at least 1GB of high quality DDR or if you are so unfortunate as to be running Windows Vista instead of XP then 2-3GB of DDR and at least 128MB vid card, have all your settings optimized for best performance, etc.) in which case it will not be nearly as catastrophic.
I speak from my recent experience of being called by a client to "fix" two of his computers: a 1.6GHz Pentium 4 with 256MB DDR and an older 900Mhz Pentium 3 with 384MB. So I came and did all the usual tweaks with the registry, eliminating needless apps and files, updating all drivers, adjusting system settings for best performance, defragmented the HDDs, etc. Very minute difference, as I expected.
Then I uninstalled Norton Security 2008, installed AVG Free Antivirus, free Lavasoft Ad-Aware anti-spyware, free Spybot SD anti-spyware, and turned Windows XP Firewall on.
WHOA!!! It was truly a night-and-day difference, in every clearly visible, measurable way: both machines booted up much faster, opened and closed applications much faster, performed simple file tasks much faster...my client's jaws were on the floor for the next half hour! Even the Pentium 4 machine, which really needs at least 512MB of memory, was transformed. But it was the Pentium 3 which showed the most dramatic improvement...the guy thought it had a virus or something because it was so deadly slow in performing even the simplest tasks, like refreshing a browser window.
To bad for him, he had just forked out big bucks for a one-year subscription, but he quickly agreed that losing that money was still a lot cheaper than buying two new computers.
I've had similar experiences uninstalling McAfee's security software, which is another notorious and overpriced system hog and which, like Norton, often does not even stop all of the stuff that AVG, Ad-aware and Spybot do.
Both of these big-name jokes are completely unneeded in light of the exceptionally good, clean freeware that I've mentioned above. It really makes you wonder if both McAfee and Norton (along with Microsoft with its new and equally bloated Vista OS) are in cahoots with computer manufacturers to force people to upgrade their PCs in order to run this useless bloatware.
About 20-25 years ago, when Norton first got big, it used to be a pretty decent. Now it's just another shameless, Bose-like scam upon the naive and uninformed masses, corporate and individual. Really too bad...
Beware of renewals October 9, 2007
Darryl A. Eymard
34 out of 40 found this review helpful
I bought Norton Internet Security 2007 with protection for up to 3 PC's. My subscription is expiring and when I go to renew, I find out I have to pay $50 per PC to renew the subscription! Renewal does not buy you coverage for 3 PC's, but one! Symantec wants to you to buy a whole new product.
If Symantec advertises "Protection for up to 3 PC's," then renewal should cover 3 PC's also, not single. And they don't.
Awfull: kills performance, inscrutable menus December 21, 2007
David Bland (Teaneck, NJ USA)
29 out of 29 found this review helpful
One of the worst products I've ever had.
(1) It killed performance on my XP machine (500mb ram) even after I had seemingly turned everything except off except the virus checking. Doing anything on the PC was painfully slow after installation, and booting up in the first place was interminable.
(2) The user interface is terrible and totally unintuitive, making it very difficult to figure out how to change settings. I'm a professional programmer with lots of experience and I can't tell you how much time I wasted trying to figure out how to configure this thing.
(3) Adding insult to injury, you can't even uninstall it using the Control Panel's Add/Remove programs, instead you have to download the Norton Removal Tool to get rid of it.
I recommend that you trial any security software before you buy, all of them offer trials
Norton incompatible with... Norton! October 16, 2007
John Galt (Denver, CO)
25 out of 32 found this review helpful
Gone are the days when a Norton/Symantec product could or should be trusted as an out-of-the-box standard. Long gone. Advice: spend another 10-15 minutes on the internet researching competitor's alternate products and avoid wasting $70 (before rebates, etc.) on this product.
The details:
Norton's latest (on my computer) product, NIS 2008, is incompatible with SystemWorks. Installation of NIS tells you to uninstall all Norton products. Another way to get you to buy yet another upgrade/replacement product? Ingenious revenue generation.
LiveUpdate, the feature that is supposed to keep your anti-virus definitions up to date, consistently crashes with well-publicized errors. Just google LiveUpdate or luall.exe
New "Auto-fix" feature advises that product should be uninstalled with every error message.
Support? You guessed it, India. DO NOT UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES ALLOW SYMANTEC SUPPORT TO INITIATE A REMOTE SESSION ON YOUR PC. They disable your keyboard and leave your PC running Buddha-knows-what diagnostics until the PC locks/crashes. Then, good luck trying to get Mushmed back on the phone.
Are you getting the picture?... "Raving" reviews must be from a) someone who has never used a previous Norton/Symantec problem and truly has no track record with the product family or b) an employee at this illustrious firm.
Sorry I can't rate this zero stars.
Corrupted key Vista files, leading me to have to completely reinstall EVERYTHING on my computer. February 24, 2008
S. Stanley (Denver, CO USA)
25 out of 26 found this review helpful
I am a long time, very sophisticated computer user (PCs). I've used all the major internet security, anti virus programs, etc. over the years. I'm very technical and know a lot about Windows, etc. I say that as a backdrop so you don't think I'm some newbie that made some elementary mistake. I have a IBM Thinkpad T 61 vintage late fall 2007. Very fast processor, 3GBs of RAM, all the bells and whistles. Despite the many frutrating things about Vista, the machine itself has performed flawlessly. (I still only trust using an XP machine for real work, and this computer is my backup if my main laptop goes down (It's a T60)).
Okay, all you need to know about MY experience is that sometime during the installation of this product, something hung up and Norton started to collect A LOT of information about my computer to send in an error report. I'm telling you, it collected a lot. I'm not a privacy freak--that's not my point. It sent a load of info on to Norton about the "event" and very politely told me (asked me) what it was doing. Okay, well and good, but I find the event caused a major corruption in the Vista system. This led to me needing to COMPLETELY reinstall everything on the computer, starting with the back up CDs that came with it (Actually, the stuff is on the hidden partition on the T 61.) So, now I'm looking at needing to spend approximately a day or more to get my machine back to where it was running fine before I tried to install Norton Internet Security 2008. I left Norton in the 90s because I kept finding their software led to the most confusing, hardest to fix problems with PCs. (They try to do too much.) Came back to them about 3 years ago when they started trouncing McAffee's suite for smartness and efficiency. Have been happy with them to this day, but that phrase "to this day" has some special meaning now. I'm done with Norton. This was such a collossal mistake/problem with their software. I will not give them more of my business.
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![Norton Internet Security 2008 up to 3 Users [OLD VERSION]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41OnZfgRayL._SL500_.jpg)
