Customer Reviews

Norton Internet Security 2004 Professional

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(23)

 

 

After very lengthy installation and activation on my Notebook computer (Win XP Pro with Internet Information Services 5), Internet Explorer could not be started. It kept "waiting for reply" - that's when I was trying to reach http://localhost. Then I discovered the installation had also prevented me from accessing Sharing and Security ... on Windows Explorer - even when Personal Firewall was switched off. I had purchased the "Professional" edition of Norton Internet Security believing it would give professional results. Very disappointed. Had to uninstall the lot to recover full functionality in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. Could find nothing helpful in Symantec's support knowledge base. A whole evening wasted! In disgust and in urgent need of a firewall, I downloaded Zone Alarm Pro trial version and it worked perfectly. No hitches. In the past, I've never been able to reach a human voice on Symantec's support service by phone in Australia. I've been using Norton AntiVirus and the free version of Zone Alarm, but thought Norton Internet Security Professional Edition would be the best way to go in starting my small business. If I don't get the service I need after logging an online query for help, I'll be taking up Symantec's offer to hand in the software and get my money back - but they say it may take six weeks to process the redemption!! I'll never buy another box of software before reading Amazon's reviews. I should have known better. Anyhow, Happy New Year, everyone !!

I bought Norton Internet Security 2004 after I got a VIRUS that NAV 7 corporate edition couldn't detect or remove. I thought upgrading the 4 year old program would help. Nope! Norton detects Trojan.Bookmarker.Gen but even in Dos mode is unable to fix it. It turns out that I got an advanced form of the Cool web search trojan/spyware. Well Norton seems to care less. I emailed them about the problem with no response after 2 months. They used to let you submit a new virus discovery but I couldn't find anything anywhere on their site about reporting new viruses.

What happened!?

I guess I could pay them by calling their highly over priced help line to tell them their program sucks but they already have too much of my money.

And what is it with these guys claiming that because it is spyware it is not a virus. If a program hides itself, alters files without permission, and otherwise takes control of your system without your permission, I'm sorry it's a virus. And the leading Anti-virus software should do their job to make their software do what it's supposed to do, eliminate uninvited software(period). Stop passing the responsibility to Spyware removers. It's a virus, plain and simple.

No, I didn't install any freeware, only MS, Adobe, Macromedia, Mozilla, and Norton software. Like someone else said, get McAfee Antivirus and Zone Alarm, not this piece of worthless junk.

Am I alone in this sentiment? (...)

Way too restrictive and/or buggy. I am constantly having to turn this off to get to some web pages. So I am in greater danger than I was before. Have spent several hours trying to tune the thing per their website support instructions but it doesn't seem to do any good. Very disappointed. Never had these problems with 2003 version. I would avoid until you start seeing some positive comments or they come out with some fixes.

Update - please read the June 2004 PC World eval of firewalls. Described Norton as sluggish, etc. I took it off and installed their recommendation of PC Cillin. What a difference, my PC has gotten it's speed back. And my problems have gone away.

I bought this product sometime in Feb of 2004 and everything worked fine but then one day about three weeks ago IIS stopped working and the machine became very sluggish. I also get .mmc errors. I am running XPpro on a P4 2.4 machine w/512mg of Ram. I am now seeing that many other people are having the same problems. It seems that Symantec has put something in one of their updates that disables IIS and causes other problems. If you call Symantec they lie to you and tell you they have not received any complaints and tell you they don't know what you are talking about and try to send you to a technician that will want a credit card number. DO NOT BUY THIS PRODUCT. IT IS A VIRUS IN AND OF ITSELF. It will alter your operating system without your permission. In my view that is a crime against property. I am a contractor and I have worked at many many different businesses. I can see that it is no coincidence that every place I have ever worked uses McAfee. If I could I would rate this product zero stars but the pull down list doesn't have a zero.

Based on my very postive experience with Norton Anti-Virus and Norton Personal Firewall, I didn't think twice about upgrading to Norton Internet Security Pro. I should have. It does not do properly what it is supposed to do, and it runs so many unneeded processes in the background that it may bog down your machine, depending on your specs. It's content blocking feature blocks the most absurdly innocuous webpages, graphics, etc.

On top of that, it is more often than not too unstable to be at all useful or satisfactory. The worst example of this I have found is that the NIS user/logon/password feature interferes with a similar built-in Windows feature. The average user doesn't need to password-protect access to their machine at all. In my own case I found that this element of NIS, which you are obliged to use, made it impossible to restart the computer; instead I had to do a complete shutdown (and far too often). As a consequence, the first thing I do when I start up is disable NIS altogether. If I uninstall it, I lose the anti-virus protection -- which *does* work.

I requested a refund and was sent a Letter of Destruction (LOD), which I duly signed and returned -- and never heard another thing from them. I never did get my money back.

Neither the average user who excersises common sense, nor the professional who is trained to detect threats needs NIS. You're much better off sticking to Norton Anti-Virus (or a competitor's equivalent) and running the Windows (XP) firewall if you feel you need one. Beyond that, it's just a matter of being smart enough not to walk down a dark alley with $20s hanging out of your pockets.

Lastly, if you are concerned about spyware, bots, tracking cookies, etc., checkout Lavasoft's free program called 'Ad-aware,' available from http://www.lavasoft.de/

I have Norton Internet Security 2002. I have used NIS for a long time and I have, until a few months ago, recommended it for virus protection, anti-hacking security, ad blocking, and privacy protection.

A couple of months ago, a Live Update created an apparent problem with SYMPROXYSVC.EXE that made it very difficult to browse Web pages. Pages often downloaded as slowly as 100-200 bytes/second. (E-mail and FTP seemed unaffected by the problem.) Although Symantec was quite happy to take my money for a subscription update this March, it refused to provide E-mail technical support for the product because support for NIS 2002 had been discontinued. E-mails to customer support received nonresponsive replies (or no replies), and a customer support rep ignored my explicit requests to be put in contact with a supervisor. A fax to the attention of the customer support supervisor was ignored.

Although a subsequent Live Update fixed the underlying problem a while later, I would rate Symantec's customer and technical support as effectively nonexistent and I do take notice of the company's refusal to stand behind its product even though it took my money for an extension to my virus definition subscription. Accordingly, it is no longer possible for me to recommend anything that Symantec makes.

I forwarded a copy of the letter I faxed to the customer support department to Symantec's Investor Relations department because I think their corporate office reallly needs to know what is going on with their customer and technical support departments.

What a piece of junk:
It did not install properly, it states support for Eudora email, bit it does not w0rk.
ZoneAlarm is much better firewall, simple and works.
The worst part is the uninstall does not work. The only way to uninstall it is to download rnav2003.exe from symantec to remove this piece of junk from the registry. It is amazing that they ship a program that does not unintall yet they seem to know what is wrong and have fixed it with their rnav2003 utility program.
Do not waste your time or money on this piece of junk

I've installed on my P4 2.43 GHz, 512 Mb RAM DDR 333, HD UDMA133 80Gb, Windows XP Pro. A program-for-the-PC-that-you'll-buy-in-the-future (but now you don't have). Now my PC takes 3 minutes to arrive on the desktop! And all functions are slowed. I've un-installed! Now my PC goes fast as before. I've reinstalled after three days. The problem of slowing my PC remains the same. I used before Norton Internet Security 2003 but I've never had these problems. A little note : you can't install Norton Antivirus only, you must install all .. or nothing.
Now I try McAfee. Good-bye.

Took an hour to install, no errors. Required me to activate even before it completed installation, even before I knew it would work. After installing, it took 20 minutes to reboot my 1.8 GHz computer. After reboot, spent the next 3 hours doing updates with a cable connection. After all was installed and updated, I could not access the Internet, but everyone else could access my computer. I could not open MS Office files, and creating a 1 MB zip file took 45 minutes because NIS had to repeatedly scan the file as it was being made. It disabled my ADD/REMOVE programs so I couldn't even uninstall it. Will be spending my weekend reinstalling all my software after wiping my drive clean to uninstall this program.

This is pure junk. You will never get IIS to work, even after uninstalling NIS! Do you know why? Because it considers your desktop as a server and so it will prevent IIS to run. Why? Because Symantec wants you to buy the corporate version, for servers, which is much more expensive.
The registration is based on your hardware and there is a limit of registration attempts (not indicated anywhere explicitly). If you change a few components in your computer, it will stop working, a crash can easily corrupt it as well. You can't use it in an image file (driveimage or so) already registered because it won't work.
Customer support? In one word: nasty! They reply by email asking you to call the 1-800 number, of course won't be able to talk to anyone unless you wait for a loooong time.