Customer Reviews

Norton Systemworks / Personal Firewall 2006 Bundle

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

Read the reviews of the 4 or 5 major system utilities (Systemworks, System Mechanic, Systemsuite, etc). Guess what? Depending on which review you read, they are all outstanding products, or they are all trash. Not a single product gets glowing reviews from everyone, and each product has lots of people who had major problems. What to do? Do what I did. Just try one until it works.

I have used Systemworks and System Mechanic on various computers over the years with pretty decent results. For the last couple of years I've used System Mechanic with absolutely no problem. I just bought a new computer, and one of the first things I did was slap a copy of System Mechanic 6 Pro on it. The results? Completely trashed my brand new computer. Not really a big deal since the computer is new and I didn't have much (any) time invested in new software installation. All my documents are on my old computer, so I lost nothing. I just did a complete disaster recovery and got back to normal.

The next thing I did was install the Systemworks 2006/Personal Firewall bundle. Guess what? Flawless installation. Have run all the diagnostics and checks. Absolutely no problems.

So what does this mean? If you try one of the system utilities and it trashes your system, just uninstall it, try to get your money back, then move on to another one. I am absolutely convinced that it is a total crapshoot as to which utility will work on your system. If you think about it, they all have about the same features, so the issue is not what they can do, but whether they are stable and will work on your system. System Mechanic didn't work for me. Systemworks does. Just the way of the world. If you tried to read too much into all of the reviews, you would never buy any software for your computer, because there are always horror stories from people who had their systems crashed.

Off topic, but as an aside, it's the same thing with other programs. I am into video editing, and trying to decide between Pinnacle and Roxio Easy Media Creator. Absolute horror stories from users of both products about how unstable these products are. So....I tried the Roxio product, it works, and its stable. Good enough for me!

After reading the reviews here, I was downright scared to put this version on my computer even though I have been using Norton to protect my computers for 10 years. Their record for both easily installed software and customer support has worsened by the year.

The only good thing I can say is that if you can get these products installed on your computer, they do a great job of protecting your computer.

One mistake I think some folks are making is not uninstalling the previous Norton product before installing the new version. I didn't do this a couple of years ago and ended up with a four day relationship with technical support. And they wanted money. So this time I uninstalled first. My mistake this time around was not choosing which componenets to install, I let them all be installed. This was a big mistake I have now learned from. Go Back went around and around in circles during its installation for 1 hour and 50 minutes. Finally I stopped it's installation and uninstalled what had been installed. During my next go at installation, I specifically requested in the setup that Go Back NOT be installed. I just selected the core componenets of Norton Antivirus and Norton Utilities. Installation went very smoothly as did activation, live update of my virus definitions and so forth. With Norton Personal Firewall, I uninstalled the previous version first and the installation went fine.

Not an uneventful installation, but one that I was actually expecting to be much worse. I think a huge key is uninstalling the previous version first.

On the up side, I feel confident that my computer is well protected. And even though Norton claims to look for spyware/adware, I really wouldn't rely on theirs and would go for a third party application such as Webroot Spysweeper. Spysweeper is coexisting with Norton just fine and I think does a much better job for adware/spyware. Norton's forte is viruses and firewall protection.

I recently purchased and upgraded from NSW 2004. I didn't have any problems with the installation as other have complained about. My only complaint with Norton is that it has always been a resource hog. As long as you have a fairly high speed processor and at least 512mb of memory you'll be ok. Any older machines will see their machine slow down considerably.

My experience is based on the use of nis 2006...norton anti-virus 2006/2005,norton 2006 firewall...this year i have 3 machines limping along.crashes,error messages,damaged programs,and costly repairs.Basiclly my machines were left unprotected,from viruses,and malware.how can this be?...I did a review of norton internet security,and no one took it seriously.now complants about norton are coming in 7 out of 10 negitive.why didnt anyone heed my warnings? i know what do i know?...Could their whole 2006 releases have bugs? ...If i forget all the negitive stuff and contact symantec,do you think they would really offer to help me,without having to pay....?!!?I wish i had an answer.i have used norton products since 2001.I dont know what the answer is...Avoid 2006 version...If your older versions are working well,.."just renew your subscriptions for now"...Dont Upgrade for now please...

Norton Systemworks/Internet Security bundle installs enough machine hogging processes and services to be as bad as many viruses. While the virus protection is arguably good, the performance slowdowns cause by this product are as bad as any virus.

Its a pity you cant pick and choose which services you want to install but anytime I try to disable features like Nortons firewall it still shows up with its dumb advice and alerts. If I disable automatic updates for security reasons, it keeps flagging it as a security risk.

I'll give the product 2 stars for the antivirus protection but most of the other extras are redundant due to the built in firewall facilities in most DSL routers.

Perhaps the tuning software is useful but the non stop general outbreak alerts are completely useless. They inform you of general non-specific threats from the internet without any details of the specific threat or attack.

Don't buy software you pay good money for only to have it disabled! If I had known this was going to be disabled prematurely, I would have never had bought it.

After getting an error message that the subscription was invalid, I call support and was told the software subscription was up despite the fact that I still 4+ months left on the subscription renewal.

All I asked for for was the entire year subscription I purchased 11/7/2005 and am able to use the product (System Works 2004) until that time. I think that's reasonable, legitimate and legal as there was no agreement that I would have purchased another product to have the registration time applied to the product.

While the software I bought was SystemWorks, I don't think the draconian software policy would differ across products.

Now the product is disabled and EVERY service is disabled as well. That means, no virus scan, no disk doctor--nothing.

After reading some of the negative reviews of this bundle, I was hesitant to purchase it. However, considering that I've always been happy with Norton software in the past, I went ahead with it. To this date I have not been disappointed. The install was straightforward and problem free and the software has been working as advertised ever since.

I have used various Norton products since the days of MS DOS 3.0. I have faithfully recommended them to family and friends. Now I have egg on my face. The latest iteration of Norton System Works has disabled three older (Pentium 3 class) computers and made them unbootable. It nearly took down my one year old Centrino laptop but I was able to recover it and remove the Symantec trash. When the virus protection software is worse than the viruses out there, why bother?

AVOID THIS PROGRAM AT ALL COSTS. IT WILL DAMAGE YOUR WINDOWS OS!

Horrible installation. Systemworks 2006 fails to fully disable and uninstall its predecessor leaving me with a mess. I tried uninstalling it through Windows XP and using Symantecs SymNRT program but that failed because the software was convinced it was perpetually auto-updating, with no way to shut it off of course. Finally it occurred to me to use XP's system restore, and then use SymNRT to uninstall BOTH versions permanently. If you absolutely feel you must have Norton, be sure to uninstall your old version first. Best of Luck to you.

I have uninstalled SystemWorks 2006 and will not be going back to Symantec products. I had three problems:

1. On initial install of SystemWorks in January 2006, the "GoBack" module wiped my hard drive. This was annoying and not easy to fix.

2. I reinstalled (and had to reregister) without the GoBack module and used the software for several months satisfactorily. A few annoyances: CleanUp consistently (every night) deleted cookies and autofills I wanted to keep, so despite my entering them as exceptions in the options table, they kept disappearing.

3. I wanted to move to a faster hard drive. After following the Norton Ghost directions explicitly (and getting a "successful" message, the cloned drive would not boot up. I therefore went back to my old drive. SystemWorks required me to reinstall (and reregister). In December, after renewing my SystemWorks subscription for $49.95, I successfully cloned the disk (using EZ Gig II). Again, the only software that did not work on boot up was SystemWorks. I called customer support and was told that the server would not allow me to install on more than 3 computers. I explained the circumstances but was told "there was nothing to be done," and that I would have to buy the software again. I chose not to.

I have completely uninstalled the entire program and am now enjoying faster performance from the operating system and quicker boot times from Word, Photoshop, etc. The protections I was getting from SystemWorks are being covered by AVG AntiVirus (shareware), Registry Mechanic (shareware), SpyBot (shareware), and DiskKeeper ($30), and Microsoft's Malware Guard (free).

I have been using Norton/Symantec products for over 15 years. Never again.