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From:Symantec
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User Rating: Amazon Sales Rank:#4 |
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 Captures the internet, 2008-08-02
The Norton 360 is an easy program to load. It checks for updates immediately and begins working right away. I am pleased with the security it provides and the ease of checking any problems it may encounter while I am surfing the internet. I highly recommend it.
1 of 1 customers found the following review helpful:
 Below Par, 2008-08-02
I bought the download version of this product directly from Symantec as a license for 3 PCs. I have used Norton for several years now, so did not expect any problems. But here is what I have run into.
1. PC-1 - An XP Pro desktop. This is a workhorse machine. Installation was easy. But I noticed that all components of MS Office Pro remain in the memory even after the application is properly exited. These include Outlook, Excel, Word and Access. I have to go to Task Manager to kill the process.
Symantec has not been able to give me any answer except to call MSFT. The PC is over 4 years old and so is Office 2003 which came pre-installed. This problem never occurred before I installed Norton 360 v. 2.0. No new programs have been installed except Norton 360.
2. PC-2 - A laptop with XP Pro and Office 2003. I use this laptop very infrequently and mostly for web browsing and noticed the same problem as described above. This laptop is over two years old. Again, no additional programs have been installed on this machine except Norton.
3. PC-2 - An older (> 4 years) laptop with XP Pro and Office 2003. This laptop is at a remote location and I do not have a good way to find out if the above problem persists. But the virus scan on this laptop has been running for over ten days and not getting completed.
In summary, there are issues with this product that Symantec does not want to identify and fix. Their tech support tried to pass the buck to MSFT but when I said that the MSFT applications have been on the machines for far longer and did not have any problems, they today threw the towel and told me to uninstall the product. huh?
4 of 4 customers found the following review helpful:
 Norton 360 is a resource hog, 2008-08-02
I am a Norton Utilities and Antivirus user from way back in the DOS days. I was actually more of a fan of Norton products. They were great. Reliable. Efficient. They did the job.
I migrated over time to many version of Norton products. I really liked that earlier version of Systemworks that ran on W95 and W98. With the Systemworks that was designed for XP, I noted a reduction of functionality. My last version of Systemworks was version 2003. An okay version, but not as useful as 2001.
I decided earlier this year to upgrade to Norton's latest utilities. After all, I was loyal and I trusted Norton. I went with Norton 360 2.0.
Prior to making my purchase decision, I did research the reviews on many sites. I saw mixed reviews that ranged from "works great" to "I had so many problems that I had to uninstall it". The reviews were for version 1. At the time there were no reviews for 2.0. I needed to upgrade to something and decided to take a plunge with 2.0. Remember, I was a loyal Norton user. I figured/hoped that Norton would have addressed the problems and criticisms on version 1. It was Norton after all!
My loyalty and blind faith in Norton was a blunder. This program is a pig. It uses enormous quantities of resources, When it runs scans you can just forget about doing anything else. It often will take a huge slices of CPU time just check the status of its components. It is not a good neighbor with your other applications. When it wants to run, it runs and takes everything with it. It acts like it is the most important application on your computer. Its just a utility and needs to accept that status and run in the background at a lower priority.
It is very difficult to minimize its impact your system. You can set some functions to manual including updates and scans. However, it is always trying to reset everything to automatic. Hit "fix" on one of the warning flags and all of the automatic settings are restored.
I had to go into Task Manager or Services on occasion to kill Norton 360 processes in order to get things done that I needed to do at that moment. If I didn't stop the offending Norton 360 process, some of my applications that did real work for me would not run properly (they would run excruciatingly slow). I can not imagine what users that did not have the systems background would do. They were/are just screwed.
I have decided to go elsewhere for my security needs. The Norton that I trusted and liked does not exist anymore. RIP.
-- August 18, 2008 addendum --
I tried to submit the next comment as a separate post. I can only have one post so I am adding this to my earlier review.
Are you a gambler?
There appears to be a segment that love the product and an equal or slightly greater segment that hate the product. While the numerical standing of the reviews are not necessarily statistically accurate, they do form a image of the level of satisfaction for the product. Any manufacturer that gets the responses that this product received should be very concerned.
It is believable that those that have had a good experience with the product had a system at the time that worked well with it. Was it the quantity of processes running on their system, their systems resources or any other particular quality that makes their system unique. It does not matter to them or us what it was since it worked acceptably. It should matter to the manufacturer so that they can determine what works. Hopefully for the happy users their experience will continue to be good.
Some of the unhappy customers reported good results after the initial install. However, things started to go in the wrong direction after a few days or weeks.
I find that the overall apparent level of technical expertise was on the higher end for the unhappy customers. Most likely, these customers have tried various approaches to remedy the poor performance that they experienced. Reinstalls. Calls to customer service. Tweaking the system settings in Windows. More calls to customer service. These are not the steps that should be undertaken by any user except for very specific or rare situations. As mentioned earlier, the manufacturer should be very concerned about this product and the effect that it may have on their reputation.
This is a product advertised for mainstream distribution and usage. As such, it should install easily and run without conflict with the majority of other applications. It is a utility and should be in the background 99% of the time. If a productivity application is actively running, the utility should release resources and assume a lower priority. It should be able to detect idle periods and run resource consuming processes at those times.
So what do you do if you are considering purchasing this product and you reading these reviews? Are you going to be one of the lucky and happy customers or are you going to have problems? How much of a gambler are you?
1 of 2 customers found the following review helpful:
Norton's got a way to go yet it seems., 2008-07-29
I've been a Norton user ever since the olden days of Apple: The Mac Performa was the first color computer I ever toyed with. I had Norton 6 (I believe) and loved it. It was small, simple, effective. I used the full Norton software on later PCs and found them to be bloated and memory hogging. Not worth the money I paid for them at all.
Enter Norton 360.
I do appreciate the more silent footprint of this new Norton, however, all they did was lessen the GUI's presence. The bloat is still there, you just don't see it. Take a simple virus scan for example: I have a dualcore Centrino laptop and just a virus scan brought the poor thing to its knees. Unacceptable. Also, the cleanup works TOO well, essentially making Firefox "forget" everything even when you tell it not to.
The straw: the heuristic virus protection. It blocks websites that are in no way dangers to your computer, and deletes software programs that are just updates or patches (not warez). It assumes something must be dangerous just because it opens a port to function - guess what? A lot of software might need to do that, including some of Microsoft's own. It's no big deal. IT doesn't even prompt you first, it just takes action.
I don't recommend this. If you need total protection look into McAfee instead.
About Average, 2008-07-26
I set this up on a Vista laptop. Took about 15 minutes and then I had to register with Norton which I didn't appreciate. For a virus program, it doesn't take up too much execution time, except at startup. I usually turn on my PC and then go do something else for awhile so I don't have to sit & wait.
It hasn't caught any viruses yet, so I don't know if that is working. I'm pretty diligent about monitoring my cookies, so tracking cookies are not usually a problem.
If you use scheduled virus scan feature, set it to a time when your computer is turned on & you're not using it, as the virus scan takes us a lot of processing time.
Anti-Spam features are lacking - as is tech support - others have discussed this so I'll only state that they do not exaggerate.
Overall, this is an ok product. I'm not overly impressed, but maybe the next version will be better.
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