I have a love-hate relationship with this product. It seems to target my computers for problems, while leaving everybody else in the house just fine. After the disaster of AVG, the worst program I have ever used, Norton 360 began to look better…
BUT it turned out not to have spam filters. I had to get that elsewhere. AND now it’s endangering my computer, overheating the CPU and generally annoying the daylights out of me. I tracked the problem to a file named ccsvchst, which enables Norton to talk to Norton…so you can’t be rid of it. It’s an old problem, a known problem, and it doesn’t play nice with Microsoft Outlook or Office. Isn’t that nice? They swear up and down they fixed it in the last issue of Norton, but nay! not so. It keeps your cpu churning and churning and the fan going and going, and the only way to stop it is to reboot—I know that now. Not only that, the program won’t shut down at the request of the Taskmaster, so you have to abort it, and occasionally to shut your computer down cold.
There is a possible interface with this and some registry relic (did I mention this has a registry cleaner? doesn’t work on itself—go figure) of a prior Norton installation, so I have spent what would have been a productive writing morning wrestling with this beast, and now will have to completely uninstall Norton clean, then reinstall, reconfigure…
Quel pain! You’d think a company whose whole business is reaching into computer processes could get it right the first time!
Sophos just works. It doesn’t mess with things, it doesn’t hog up your CPU, and it’s purely functional. Yes, that sounds like a plug for them … well, I suppose that it is, because it catches things, and it … doesn’t suck up my processor power.
I don’t know about Norton 360…I use Norton Internet Security myself. But when things get fouled up (every few years), I’ve learned that I have to use Symantec’s “Norton Removal Tool” instead of the provided uninstaller.
You might want to check around to see if there’s an equivalent scrubber for AVG. My experience is that a) NO security product ever really removes itself from your registry and b) if your registry contains the detritus of competing flavors of security, you’re SOL until you scrub them both.
Lynn
I’ve heard nothing but bad things about Norton. Friends recommend Symantec (which I can get free), but I use AVG Free with ZoneAlarm firewall. I roll my own spam filters using Forté Agent–can’t use Outlook, after all.
Does anyone know if Symantec comes with a registry cleaner? That’s something that might peak my interest.
Yes. Norton 360. 🙂
Ack! I meant McAfee. (The names are so much alike. ???)
🙂 ONe product I can highly recommend is Spamfighter. They’ve been immaculate, and blazing fast. They start out as freeware: you get a good run with them so you can check it out.
My sympathies. I hate Norton products. In my (not so recent) experience, they cause lots of system problems. I’ve had good results with kaspersky and Bit Defender for virus and such.
For email, I’d highly recommend gmail. It works, and insulates you from email-borne viruses. They have a very good spam filtering system. And if you ever change ISPs, your email doesn’t have to change.
For client based email, take a look at SpamBayes — I used to run it with Outlook, and it did and amazingly good job. You have to train in with examples of what you consider good and bad email. It was spooky how well it worked.
darn I forgot to mention that Macs don’t have all these problems.
sorry 😉
I don’t know if a registry entry is the issue with Norton, but CCleaner is what I use to purge the registry.
In my experience — no matter what OS platform I’m on — I *never* do an upgrade. I always uninstall the old version and then do a fresh install the new version. Most upgrades forget something or do something wrong (too hard to anticipate the many variations in upgrade states), but the initial install usually gets it right.
I like the freeware approach CCLeaner uses…If it works, I’ll enthusiastically buy.
Kaspersky is good, and I used to use Black Ice, which also was pretty good. (It’s no longer available, unfortunately. I could see what it was catching, and that was kind of fun.)
For e-mail, I have GMail, and also NetAddress, which has some good spam filters – they actually seem to be using two different ones.
I cringed when you first said you went to Norton, but it was a done deal by then.
Norton is the consumer version of Symantec. Both have been killed off of my office network and personal machines due to resource hogging, bloatware and general misery.
Current antivirus and security suite is Avast, which I am quite happy with. Free for home use, so the price is right. I don’t think it does anti spam though.
Spam Bayes is a great Outlook add in for spam. It is interesting to follow how it scores spam. CCleaner is an excellent registry cleaner.
If you use Firefox, don’t forget those wonderful add-ons, like NoScript and Popup Blocker. They will prevent any unauthorized scripts on pages from doing a drive-by and dropping malicious bits of code. I have never regretted installing them.
Norton used to be very good, but has gone downhill in the last couple of years. There are many free programs, some of which have already been suggested, that do just as good a job, if not better, at removing unwanted garbage.
I use Firefox and CCleaner….I rarely get infected with anything due to firefox and its add ons. I also do a weekly reg cleaner with CCleaner. It keeps my computer running nice and fast.
So far I’m ok with Spamfighter, which has been efficient, fast, and adjustable…
And I’m hopeful I can get this Norton to behave. I’m going to try the complete Uninstall and retry.
If you’re removing Norton, try the Norton Removal Tool from here – http://service1.symantec.com/Support/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039 – I second using it anytime you deal with removing/re-installing of Norton. We run into a fair number of people who after uninstalling Norton especially aren’t able to get onto the internet, or get random errors, because the uninstall doesn’t go right. Generally we take them into safe mode, right to the site, download, and scrub scrub away the Norton remnants.
FWIW, booting in safe mode (pressing F8 at the BIOS/boot screen, usually select “Safe mode with networking”) is good for running the Norton Removal Tool because it ensures Norton isn’t running and hasn’t locked any files. Sadly, you can’t use Add/Remove to pull Norton out in safe mode, because Norton refuses to run it’s add/remove whilst in safe mode.
There is an AVG removal tool, over here – http://www.avg.com/us-en/download-tools – that might help make sure no remnants are lingering.
I also second CCleaner for registry scrubs, since it’s fairly intelligent about registry entries being valid/less than valid. But if you’re noticing bog-down on the PC, can’t hurt to run MalwareBytes – its a pretty excellent spyware/malware/trojan blaster, just to be on the safe side.
As far as antivirus goes, I personally use Avira on one PC, Mcaffee on my (rarely booted, since Linux took over the laptop’s other half) Windows Vista, and used to go with AVG until it got bloated and slow. For paid solutions, I’ve heard Kaspersky and NOD32 highly recommended. My wife has Norton, but I have to clean spyware off her PC regularly – though thats partly because she installs things.
I’m a bit of a security paranoid -I run Comodo firewall, CCleaner to scrub the PC and rid me of random registry entries since I install and uninstall a lot of games/etc. Then there’s Spybot S&D with resident protection as a primary anti-malware/trojan solution, and a regular habit of throwing MalwareBytes on and scanning with it. On the plus side, this means I’ve never had my Win XP install borked beyond recovery, and no virus/trojan of note. On the minus side, it all takes a lot of TIME. I’m sure you’d rather be writing, or skating, than wrestling computers.
THank you for that link. I am suspicious I have a remnant of an original Norton installation from 6 years ago: it fits all the online comments on this problem. As soon as I can get the Norton file from Jane’s computer, I’ll be working on it.
That can definitely happen, and is far from fun. Hopefully the removal tool works out for you – the other options are manually finding and removing registry entries, files, hidden TCP/IP drivers, and other types of madness that make normal humans scream.
Definitely try both the AVG and Norton removal tools.
Another trick I know is to disable the browser add-ons in Internet Explorer that pre-scan every link from a page you go to, which is one of the things that can slow AVG and Norton down to a crawl.
Before you install Norton again, you might want to try Avast Home Edition, which is free. It offers excellent quality protection, and runs quietly in the background, without using too many system resources. I’ve been using it for a couple of years now and never had any problems with it.
http://www.avast.com/eng/avast_4_home.html
It’s a great thing to exchange recommendations—I’m finding out all sorts of things.
From a technical point of view Norton’s AV engine is pretty poor. It just about makes it into the top ten lists from the likes of av comparatives. Technically I would have to say that Kaspersky is probably the best at the moment (though I hate to saw it), McAfee is pretty good (but I’m biased as I used to work on it). Sophos isnt bad either.