Norton Antivirus ate my balls

C

Carl64

Joined
Apr 3, 2005
Messages
1,830
We have this worthless piece of shite program at work, and it's always grinding away all day and slowing things down. It's almost like having a virus. Every time the computer locks up, it's Norton sitting on 90% of the memory.

They system tray icon will have little error indicators on it sometimes, but it won't tell you what it is. The fancy event log doesn't list any errors, and clicking on it just brings up the main program.

If I try to close Norton and restart it, the computer freezes. No desktop, no mouse, no task manager, nothing.

It doesn't just suck because it screws up. The manual file scan feature takes forever. If you want to check a file you just downloaded, you are going to be staring at Norton for a while. AVG does it in under 5 seconds.
 
Thumbs Up for AVG. I've also used Avast and it seems very well-mannered also. Anything's better than the Norton/McKaffee programs that come "complimentary" (complimentary, like a rash from a toilet seat) on new storebought computers.

-Bob
 
I've actually heard bad things about AVG, with problems such as missing viruses picked up by other scanners.

From what I've heard, NOD32 is the best one out there, constant updates, quick scans, small memory useage.... good stuff :)


EDIT: The following guy, who calls himself Kobra has tested all the known AV products, take a look:

By Kobra 2/27/04

---------
Phew, the last few days have left me drained a good bit. I've tested over a dozen Anti-Virus programs pretty extensively. This testing was spured by the fact that NortonAV 2004 missed the third Trojan/virus this month and let the latest one run free, and wouldn't even stop it. This led to research that indeed showed NortonAV is one of the worst AV programs out there (AVG has the title of the worst). But it also showed me that most of the big commercial AV softwares are rather poor and overrated...

My initial sweep of tests narrowed the field of contenders down to a four HARDCORE AV programs, amoung these were:

Kaspersky AV
BitDefender
Panda
NOD32

I found all 4 of these to offer superb protection, and I personally feel nobody could go horribly wrong with choosing any of the 4 - but some aren't as good as the others in my opinion - read on.. They all offer daily updates, and one (BitDefender) offers updates every 8 hours. The company that supports NOD32 releases updates daily but sometimes during outbreaks they come in HOURLY.

All 4 offer realtime protection for emailing, surfing the net, memory and basically anything that happens on your computer throughout the day. Kasperskys resident program clearly had memory leaks, and performance degradation of the system was noticable. The others offered no measurable difference in performance. NOD32 does not scan outgoing mails, only incoming and databases, all the rest scan both inbound and outbound.

For normal scanning, all 4 offer this of course, as a core of any AV program. The differences in speed between them was astounding. When all of them were set to scan at the same level of detail (full, archives, deep), they all scanned at different speeds. Results are here:

160GB Hard drive, filled with 60+GB of programs. (and lotsa them)

Kaspersky - 6 hours!
BitDefender - 55 minutes
Panda - 43 minutes
NOD32 - 7 minutes!!!

Clearly, Kaspersky has some serious issues with its scanning engine, namely, it sucks. BitDefender and Panda were both good, and fast, but NOD32 was simply out of this world in its speed! 7 minutes for a very deep scan, only 3-4 minutes for a normal scan. Kaspersky was also plagued with false positives and inaccuracies.(more on this later)

For my testing, I burned a CDR with 5 total viruses and trojans. 3 of them were fake, designed by Eicar, but mimic trojans and viruses, and 2 of the other ones were real, one was a trojan. All 4 of the programs wouldn't even let me copy these to my hard drive without going off with their background scanners. In addition, I tried downloading fake viruses from Eicar, and all of the programs caught every single one of them, but NOD32 and BitDefender took this a step farther and actually intercepted them BEFORE they were allowed to be copied to temp folders, the others dealt with them after being in temp folder.

Kaspersky exhibited a serious problem with false alarms. It flagged one of my files - DVDFab.v1.51.WinALL.Cracked-BLiZZARD.RAR as containing a Trojan named: Backdoor.Aphexdoor.10, which is a new trojan found only a few weeks ago. This scared me, since no other product detected a problem with this file, so I sent the file specifics into NOD, Panda and BitDefender, and got replies from all three within a few hours. The result? False reporting from Kaspersky. Best that anyone could determine was that at one time, this archive DID contain the trojan, but it had already been purged and cleaned by someone elses virus system, and a original build signature was left in the RAR info or something.

I have personally verified this as well, Trojan Hunter found nothing in the file, I even installed the file and watched the background files be logged and there is no trojan in it. So it appears that Kaspersky doesn't have any control on their scanning and basically reports EVERYTHING, without any real control or error correction, or any discrimination. Which would explain the 4-6 hour scan times maybe?

As for their interfaces, Panda has the simplest and most easy interface -however this comes at the price of configurability and options - which this product doesn't have. It does a GREAT job, but just isn't configurable and doesn't offer much flexibility. BitDefender is the overall winner in terms of interface, with the best and easiest interface with great configurabilility. NOD32 comes in a close second, being more for the advanced user, with massively configurable options, and 3 seperate integrated modules. Kaspersky comes in last place, with what is perhaps, the worst interface known to man. Clumsy, sloppy, slow, and doesn't even look like a windows product! HORRIBLE!

NOD32 is the most advanced overall, with the most features and configurations, BitDefender is second but only by a small margin. It should be noted that Microsoft itself uses NOD32 to scan all of their products that they have, and products they are prepping to send out to be burned for distribution.

Overall, heres how I rate the best, and I honestly feel that these 4 products are the best, if you are seeking a anti-virus solution, i'd recommend you pick one of the 4, they all work pretty well, but heres how I rate em if you want the best in my opinion.

1. NOD32 - The king in my tests, lacking in only one area, outbound email scanning(but is this really needed anyway?), but ungodly strong in every other area with more features than you can possibly imagine. HOURLY updates are supported as well and the program has such a small and unobtrusive interface its hard to not fall in love with it. The sheer speed of its scanning engine is another reason I liked this one the most.
http://www.nod32.com/home/home.htm

2. BitDefender - Close second to NOD32, very close.. This one was a tough call! Bitdefender has a friendlier interface, and supports outbound email scanning as well. But it placed second only because its scanning was considerably slower than NOD32, and it lacked a few configuration options that I really enjoy in NOD32. GREAT choice though. Tough call!
http://www.bitdefender.com/index.php

3. Panda - This guy is really nice, finds threats that all the big commercial ones like Norton/McAfee and others miss. But lacks configurability and options, and doesn't seem to have as advanced of a scanning engine. Also it has daily updates, rather than 8 hours like Bit, and hourly like NOD32. Either way, Panda is superb choice, especially for those not worried about configurability.
http://www.pandasoftware.com

4. Kaspersky - Its hard to recommend this product. Its slow, the interface sucks, it takes up too much ram and has memory leaks, and takes hours to scan your drives. It also LOVES reporting threats that have already been neutralized, or non-existant threats - which can drive you crazy! I've also found Kaspersky prone to crashing and lockups. Even still, its not a bad product, just horribly un-refined and clumsey.
http://www.kaspersky.com/

Hope this helps anyone looking for a top end AV product. I've found that its best to TOTALLY avoid the big marketed enduser products like Norton, Mcafee, Pc-cillin and the others. They performed HORRIBLY compared to the ones on this roundup. Also, I tested AVG, and found it to be perhaps the worst product ever, it missed even the most basic dummy viruses I sent its way.

Checking Virus Bulletin, I see NOD32 has nearly a 100% perfect record over the last few years, and is the only product to score nearly this high.

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?eset.xml
25 passes, 3 fails. One fail in 1998 under Dos, another in 2000 under NT, and in 2002 with SuSE Linux. Nothing has come close to this performance at VBTN. compare this with my top-4 list.

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...l?kaspersky.xml
Kaspersky 20 passes, 13 fails.

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...s.xml?panda.xml
Panda 1 pass, 3 fails. (but in fairness, its a new product for Vbnt)

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/pro...bitdefender.xml
BitDefender 3 passes, 5 fails.

Obviously in their testing methodlogy, NOD32 is far far and away the ultimate winner. But I don't subscribe, so I cannot see what they use as a
testbed. My guess is they throw a few hundred virus at each product, and see how it reacts. On a side note, AVG's score:

http://www.virusbtn.com/vb100/archives/products.xml?avg.xml
AVG 3 passes 20 fails...
---------------

Well, there you go, never touch AVG and norton, just because there easy to get or free, I'm not saying you suck because you have the "not so good" AV software, but I came here to say this just to ensure the bladeforums people have good protection :D
 
I too for the last few years have HATED anything Norton AV related , it was a huge resource hog when I had my old dinosaur of a Cel 400.
When I upped about 1.5 years back to my present system , norton was still a hog although I had more resources so it evened out , eventually I just want to Avast.
However now at my work we use Symantec corporate version and it is far far better than the older Norton product , it doesnt use hardly any resources and doesnt cause those PITA hang-ups or freezes.
I really recommend this newer product by Symantec.

Also while were on the topic of AV , I highly recommend this online scan as well , I have used this to pull 4 computers back from the possible OS reload grave , including my own that had a trojan so bad that Symantec couldnt touch it.
http://www.ewido.net/en/onlinescan/

Enjoy.
 
I can hook you up with a copy of nod32 if you're interested... mine is good for some 900yrs still ;) :D
 
Carl64,

Although Norton is relatively resource-intensive, it shouldn't be using up all the memory or doing some of the other things you describe. There are certain compatibility issues between NAV and other applications, for instance some versions of NAV and Zone Alarm won't play nicely on the same system and you'll get all kinds of problems. I'd look in to this if you can.
 
VampyreWolf said:
I can hook you up with a copy of nod32 if you're interested... mine is good for some 900yrs still ;) :D
Click to expand...

Hook a brother up!!! :D :thumbup:
 
Keep in mind that every scanner that I know of will miss something, some do better than others is all. I have been using AVG Free for years with no problems on my computers. It is really as much a matter of personal taste as anything else I guess.

It also really depends on what you do with the computer, and how smart of a user you are. If you go visting every site that gets emailed to you with an offer for free goods or money then nothing will protect you. If on the other hand you use some descretion when surfing the web, and doing other things that can let a virus in, you are already a long way ahead of any AV software. Also using a limited account for daily use helps prevent a virus from destroying Windows.
 
I'm totally with you on this. Norton sucks. My new computer came with a free trial of it. Between uninstalling it and AOL, I cut the number of processes I had running by 13! My computer also boots up and shuts down much faster now.
 
First thing I always do a on a new computer is un-install Norton and anything else that I don't even thing I need. Usually frees up a bunch of memory and HD space.

And like ErikD mentioned. If you're moderately careful with your web surfing, your email and your IM, most any anti virus will be fine. I'm sticking with AVG, as it's always worked wonders for me (except on the computer I let my daughter use... "huh? click this link that was IM'd from someone I don't know? Sure, that would be the bomb!" Grumble, grumble as I spend hours to get that crap off there. I was almost to the point of nuking the hard drive when I finally got it.
 
i hate norton too, it made my computer comparable to a calculator. now i use f-secure and i set it up so its just lurking and doing its thing quiet, the only thing i do is press the yes-button when f-secure wants to download some new virusdefintions files, and that happens when i turn on the computer, after that i never notice it
 
I have used Norton Internet Security for 5 years and have had no problems. I run Panda's Online Scan every few months and it only finds stuff in Norton's Quarantine folder. I have used NOD 32 as a test and seem to remember config was complex. Also used Free-AV, and AVG as tests. The only one I dropped was McAfee in 1999 after I got a virus. The new version seems better which I installed for a friend.

All AV needs to be installed on a clean install of the OS for best trouble-free results.
 
I like Norton Anti-Virus and Internet Security. They both work reliably and do everything I ask them to do.

While they may be resource hogs to some, I find a lot of other applications are much worse.

My primary system is a 2.2Ghz Pentium 4 and this geezer I'm on right now is a 450Ghz Pentium 3 which I upgraded to 384Mb or memory. Neither machine comes to a grinding halt with downloaded files or internet surfing so, I wonder if your problem is related to something else and giving you a false sense that Norton is the problem. I had a program at work which deactivated Norton Anit-Virus and disabled the scans. It turned out to be a hardware problem of all things. Swapped the motherboard and CPU combination and that problem went away.
 
I have seen the many Norton processes using over 250 MB of Ram at Idle on a system. At the same time it was lagging out the internet, the worst program I have ever seen. The Symantec Corporate software is pretty good, however.
 
ken: got gmail? looking at about a 9mb email.

edit, did some math...
16716040 days remaining... 365 days per year... 45797.37 yrs of "free trial"
 
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