Symantec Norton Antivirus 2006

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.