Customer Reviews

Norton Password Manager 2004

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

After waiting forever for this product to actually be released, I am severely disappointed after having it for 24 hours. First, it can only be installed on one computer so you have to buy additional copies for your home and work computer. Second, once it starts remembering your passwords it is great about automatically filling them in for you at web sites and programs, however you can never see your passwords in the clear again. Since the program remembers them for you, it won't be long before you forget all your passwords, without retrieval. Since you can't see them in the clear, they are lost to the internal encryption within the program. It desperately needs a way to see all your passwords in the clear if you so choose!

There are no provisions to backup your passwords, nor provisions to randomly generate passwords. How can I move my passwords from a desktop to a laptop? This software does not allow you to control where the data is saved. This software assums that you have some other master list of passwords in case this data is lost. I can't believe Norton put their name on this product.

Everyone of us wants to have a secure digital password manager to help in organizing and accessing your critical information, be it credit card number, banking account or web site access.
You do not want to entrust all this information to some shareware program from no-name vendor. That's why I was very excited to see a late entrance by Symantec - a name you can trust (within reason) would not misuse your data for a personal gain.

Howerer this particular version 'Norton Password Manager 2004' is completely unusable and actually can bring more problems then solve them. Let's see:
- it requires additional license (= more money to Symantec) for each PC you are going to install it on;
- it is limited to store only three addresses per user profile (I guess Symantec knows better then user how many addresses user may have);
- detects userID:Password logins from some Windows programs (not all) and from about a 1/3 of all sites I tried it on (so you can still excercise your memory remembering the rest of logins);
- only works with Internet Explorer of all browsers (Microsoft stopped by and said thanks)
- does not allow you to see your own passwords, once you are finally able to teach the program to store them for you (how is that for managability?)
- does not allow for manual data entry except for credit card information, so if you have a banking or brokerage account you want to store - good luck with that;
- not portable, so you can't take it with you on the road

Symantec should be ashamed to put a Norton trademark on such a lousy product. Did they listen to customers at all when designing it?

This program misses the mark by a large margin. I bought this program thinking I could store all the username/password dataon the many websites that require this information. From the start, I tried 5 different websites that I use frequently (e.g. brokerage sites, credit union, & merchant sites) and NPM only worked for one website. NPM attempts to recognize web pages that need username/password info and when you enter data on one of these web pages it asks you whether to store the data you just entered. Problem for me was, that 4 out of the first 5 sites NPM never asked me whether I wanted to save this info! Since there is no manual way to force NPM to remember user/password data, you are simply out of luck - the program fails! Buried deep on the Symantec Knowledge Base is a web page to submit such bugs of which I submitted 3 bugs in 1 hour. I twice asked for a reply to my problem reports and received none. Also, not being able to view the user/password data for sites that do work, as mentioned in a previous post, is a huge problem if you're trying to share some of this data with your spouse. Symantec spent more time on the cool scrollable graphics then they did on making this software useable and robust. Needless to say, I'm sending this software back for a refund.

Not a good product at all. I should have realized that the fact that Norton has not provided a new version of this in years (sounds like they gave up on it). The product sometimes will stop working and will not fill in websites it already has info on. Closing and reopening does no good. Rebooting does, but that's not a workaround. Whoever certified this product for release clearly needs to be fired. And whoever is responsible for Norton's support on this product should follow them out the door. I'll probably dump Norton altogether (I have their antivirus program) since they cannot even figure out a basic product like a password manager.

If you spend a lot of time on the internet, you probably have dozens of websites you need a username and password to log into. You may be tempted to use the same username and password for all websites, but this is bad for your security. For example, for your online banking account or any site that stores financial or any important information, you should have a unique username and password that is used nowhere else. The problem is it is impossible to remember more than a few usernames and passwords. So what do you do? You use software that will save and automatically fill in your username and password.

Recently I got Norton Password manager 2004 bundled with the latest updates for Norton Antivirus. Although I was perfectly
satisfied using a program called Roboform, I figured Symantec is a big company with lots of money to develop the best product, so just maybe their product may actually beat Roboform. I used it for two weeks and what were my findings? Read on to find out.

While Internet Explorer and some other web browsers have the ability to save form information and usernames/passwords, you have no access to that stored information whatsoever, and you can't even tell what is being stored. That is why you may need password management software. Both software will allow you to save passwords and save form information. That is the minimum you should expect in a password manager. Norton does this satisfactorily but there are some time-saving features that it is missing.

Benefits of Norton Password Manager 2004:

* Save multiple profiles (Save different information to be filled in - work profile, home profile, business profile)
* Save multiple credit cards
* Require password prompting before filling in information (optional--can be turned off)

Time-saving Features Norton is missing:

* View and edit saved usernames and passwords.
* Go to login url - you can go to the login URL (which isn't always on the main page).
* Choose to have forms filled in automatically or click a button when prompted to fill in information.
* Custom fields (Create custom-named fields and enter the information you want filled in. Norton only fills in fields it
recognizes (name, address, city, state, etc.)

Conclusion: Norton Password Manager 2004 can't compete with my favorite password manager. Roboform has all the features Norton has and the missing features I mentioned above. It is simply much more versatile. You have more control over everything it does. Best of all, you can get it for free.

A better alternative is Bagusoft Password Safe. (www.bagus-software.de). It also has an AutoFill function and you can use it on a USB stick. It's cheaper than Norton and there's also a Freeware Version without AutoFill.

This simply doesn't perform the functions a password manager needs to in order to do the job. The most serious problem is that there is no way to retrieve or see a current password. Thus it will log in to a login page OK, but when you want to change passwords a different page generally asks for the existing password and two entries of the new one; there is no way to get the existing password onto that page unless it was written down initially, which defeats the purpose of the software. Naturally the problem is most serious in those places where you want complex nonsensical passwords and those changed often; exactly those places for which one buys the software. Avoid it. I suggest www.browserplus.com for an excellent, more functional, and cheaper alternative.

I bought Password Manager when it was first released and was very satisfied with it. But then came the crashes and its unwillingness to start up correctly (e.g., the Sign In dialog would not display on reboot). After years of uninstalling and reinstalling Password Mangler to fix its variety of issues -- always having to go back to the original installation CD and work _up_ from there -- and struggling with Symantec's obscure and unhelpful Web site (and their obscure and unhelpful off-shore technical support), I'm giving up on it.

Password Manager has not been supported for well over two years now, and the Symantec site hopefully suggests a variety of products to "upgrade" to that do NOT include Password Manager (BEWARE of that trap!) -- you may think you've upgraded, but you haven't...you've simply bought a new product that does not include Password Manager.

20+/-years ago, "Norton" applications were the cat's meow and the only elegant salvation for lost and corrupted file DOS issues, including the infamous "format c:/" oopsie.

Since Symantec (then mostly a Mac shop...a clue, in retrospect) bought up Norton, product development, support, engineering, and QA have gone into the toilet. Passsword Manager had its flushing success, as well.

After trying the free trialware version I bought a copy of this program on Ebay for about $10, for that price it has done its job. As with other reviewers, there just isnt a central file or somewhere that you can see your passwords on, like a spreadsheet. One change I would make in this program is that it assumes that you only have 1 account on every webpage. yes the program allows for several user profiles however, if for example, you have 2 yahoo email accounts, it will only allow 1 password per page per profile. otherwise you would have to manually type in the second account each time which defeats the purpose of the program.