I’ve been using Norton products for many years now. The last one I bought outright was Norton System Works 2002, which was great. I’ve had that installed and running for four years. Each year I get prompted to renew my virus subscription, and paid whatever they were asking. Never had a virus, and overall I had no major problems with it, so I never bothered to upgrade.
This time around, though, I was unable to renew the virus subscription. Norton is no longer supporting System Works 2002. I’d have to upgrade Norton Antivirus to the latest version. The thing is, I’ve heard SO much bad news about Norton products in the last year or so. Seems like they have just kept forcing features into their products in order to justify a new version every year, and now they seem to do more harm than good.
So I started looking at other virus solutions. Finally settled on Avast antivirus. Personal version is free and seems to get pretty good reviews. Installed that successfully.
Then I started looking at the rest of the stuff that was in System Works 2002. All I ever used from it was the WinDoctor and SpeedDisk (defrag) utils. Actually, in the last few months, I noticed that WinDoctor was kind of useless. It kept coming up with errors that it could not fix. So I constantly had this growing list of unresolved issues. Yuck. I wound up buying Registry Mechanic, which repaired all of those errors and found literally hundreds of other issues that Norton didn’t find.
Today I just installed Diskeeper for defragging, which really kicks SpeedDisk’s butt. One cool thing it has is a boot-time defrag, which you can set to defrag system files that cannot be moved while the OS is running. It also has a smart schedule feature that monitors your disk and does a less intense defrag whenever things are getting a little messy. It supposedly monitors your usage too, so that it’s not tying up your cpu and disk with its work while you’re trying to do your work. So far it looks pretty good, but I’m a little wary of that. Anyway, if it does get in the way, I can disable that feature.
With all that going, I uninstalled and said goodbye to Norton. It’s kind of an interesting commentary on the software business. Marketing instists on new, groundbreaking features every year. Stuff that the competition is not doing, that nobody has ever done before. What gets left behind is good simple software that is easy to use and just does what it’s supposed to. I can already see Diskeeper going in that direction with the smart scheduling and some of the other advanced features. We’ll see.
I had a worm a year ago that was digesting my computer. Norton was ignoring it and Avast actually found it. I think it’s an excellent product.
Go Avast and Diskeeper! That reminds me, I have to defrag 😛
Hmmm .. I have SystemWorks 2005, so I ran Norton’s 1-button checkup, part of which is a registry scan. No errors. I downloaded Registry mechanic — it found over 500 errors after Norton said there were none.
I may be saying adios to Norton as well when my subscription comes up for renewal.
I’ve been using Avast for over a year now. It’s a great little anti-virus app. Can’t beat free!
I think all these AV/reg cleaner type products are really a bit of a scam. I’ve been running the same XP install that’s been virus and crash free for over three years.
The best anti-viral measure anyone could ever take is simply ditching IE and buying a decent router to protect them from the internet, and not downloading dodgy stuff from dodgy sites. Since taking these measures I’ve not been infected once. No AV, no Norton (I used to be a norton evangelist) no nothing, except the occasional sweep of spybot and the NT defragger. I used to run diskkeeper, but it’s not really all that good imo, and after doing some proper research into defrag settled back on the default NT one. Whats wrong with the NT defrag???
IE is the biggest virus/trojan/backdoor of them all. Dump it and be free of all the other stuff that simply patch its shortcomings!
Of course, once the kids are a bit older, I’ll probably be eating humble pie over these comments.
I also ditched Norton when my 2005 subscription ran out and it gave me fits because I had it on all 3 of my systems.
I did some research and settled on Kaspersky’s Suite (AV, Anti-hacker, and other tools). I paid $60 for 2 years worth of upgrades and definitions, same price as 1 year of Norton 2006 Suite. I tried AVG, it’s OK for being free. I still use Zone Alarm along with Kapsersky’s Anti-Hacker which functions as a firewall too.
I have used AVG for years and love it; it alwasys wins awards from PC Magazine. I also use Zone Alarm too.
Spender, viruses are real, and IE isn’t the only door in for them. Registries do get messed up, and I’ve seen errors vanish and perfomance improve drastically after repairing them. As for built in defragging vs. 3rd party, I can’t say with certainty that either is better. I’ve seen lots of advice that says ditch the built in ones and get a “real” defragger. So honestly I don’t know about that one.