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Symantec Norton Antivirus 2006
80
Very Good
- Avg User Rating
- 11 User Reviews | add yours »
- Pros
- Easy-to-use interface
- Cons
- Phone support costs $30 per incident
- $7.98 - $39.99
- From 2 Merchants
PC World Editor's Review
by Tony Bradley
This popular antivirus product has comprehensive features and solid performance but expensive phone support.
In "The New Virus Fighters" roundup of antivirus products, Norton Antivirus 2006's good feature set and friendly interface earned the product an overall ranking of fifth place, despite unexceptional performance.
Of the ten products tested, Norton Antivirus ranked sixth in performance. While it tied for first place, along with F-Secure Anti-Virus 2006, at detecting our zoo collection of backdoor programs, bots, and Trojans, its heuristics, speed, outbreak response time, and clean-up test results were middle-of-the-road.
This product, which includes an antispyware engine, provides some features that most other antivirus products don't--for example, it scans instant messaging traffic. It also secures your PC against browser hijackers, keystroke loggers, and other forms of spyware and adware. Its $40 price is moderate, though its phone support is not: You pay a whopping $30 per incident.
Norton Antivirus is easy to get up and running, and it does a better job than most of its competitors at providing useful information in pop-up alerts. Symantec's virus notifications identify specific threats and let users knows in clear language why they should be concerned and what they should do. If users want more information, they can click a link for complete threat details on Symantec's Web site.
Upshot: This popular antivirus product combines decent performance with an easy-to-use interface, but using it can get expensive if you ever have to call the company for support.
Tony Bradley
User Reviews for Symantec Norton Antivirus 2006
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Reviewed by: snowdog59
Duration of ownership: 1 Year
Strengths: Can't think of any to speak of.
Weaknesses: Difficult installation and memory hog. Have had to reinstall several times beacause of corrupted files.
Overall Evaluation: I can't think of any reason to put this product on your machine. Norton AV 2006 has been nothing but trouble since I installed a year ago. After my latest problem though, Symantec automatically upgraded me to 2007. I will say that my machine has performed much better since being upgraded, machine works much faster and use of RAM has improved significantly. Stay away from 2006 though.
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Reviewed by: Quasar66
Duration of ownership: 2 Years
Strengths: Was good while it worked (not very long)
Weaknesses: The extensive product failures, the non-responsive support
Overall Evaluation: I owned Norton 2005 Edition - and that was due for renewal on Oct 2 2006. However, September 2006, it just collapsed, causing immediate infection and significant loss of the drive content. After about a month, spending some time recovering some data, I purchased the 2006 Edition - in a CD format. This installation had no problems till Dec 31st 2006. First week of Jan, the SW stopped appearing in the start up sequence, and try as one would, after umpteen re-installations (which is not easy, please, as after every re-installation, it downloads approx 30 MB of data from Internet, then does a complete scan of the system - my system has 360K files, hence takes about four hours including downloads) the system still would stop working the next morning. The scans show absolutely no viruses or spyware etc. in spite of a clearly visible entry in the startup.ini in msconfig with no name or other details - obviously a malware. But the SW installation crashes the next instance the machine is exposed to Internet. Another word of caution for innocent users - the SW tends to disable the Windows firewall, taking over the firewall responsibility on itself - without permission from user - and then itself collapses, thus keeping the PC exposed to the Internet attacks. The support system is highly non-responsive, as the chat system and their automatic testing tool SW refused to get installed (Windows XP SP2 system on Compaq PC based on Intel P4 system). The email response was very cute - "re-install and see". Subsequent attempts to secure mail based advise failed to elicit any response. Definitely not for recommended for ordinary people dependent on PC for their regular business.
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