Customer Reviews

Symantec AntiVirus 2004 Professional Edition

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(38)

 

 

I've been using Norton Antivirus for several years. It's been pretty solid, maybe a bit slow. I thought an upgrade to the latest version would be routine. How wrong I was! The product activation has a bug on Windows XP Professional that makes it "forget" that it's been activated. And after you activate a few times, it locks out your product key leaving your computer completely unprotected. The Symantec knowledge base acknowledges the problem but cheerfully tells you they don't know how to fix it. Testing? What testing? I think it's time to get my money back and buy a product that actually works.

I have been using Norton Antivirus since Y2k when I purchased it as part of Norton System Works Pro 2001. The software was a bargain back then. It ran very well in Windows 98SE after you disabled the file backup features of Norton Utilities that ran in the background with the default installation. The Norton Antivirus always worked great and it stopped many incoming viruses over the past several years from reaching my email Inbox and the Norton Utilities kept my computer system files clean.

I also used Zone Alarm Pro along with it to provide great security on my cable modem broadband internet connection. It is now the year 2004 and I have Windows XP Pro but I still use Zone Alarm 4 and Norton System Works Pro 2003 on my main computer and will do so until my subscription updates run out. However my 1Ghz Pentium 3 notebook computer that was running the same Norton 2003 and Zone Alarm Pro 4 began to slow to a crawl with each live update that I downloaded. It became so slow it was annoying me to use that computer at all.

Then along came Norton System Works Pro 2004 which has Norton Antivirus 2004 bundled with it. I was ready to go out and purchase the product to update my 2003 version in the near future but decided to read some reviews about it. All I heard was one nightmare after another on the review sites and about how flawed the activation system was just after its release. Then I had a friend purchase and try the retail version of Norton System Works 2004 on his computer and his experience validated many of those negative claims. Here you have a company in Symantec that took the most widely used and popular antivirus and utilities products in the world and seriously decreased my loyalty to their brand.

Although no one liked when Microsoft required activation with Windows XP at least they brought you a superior and more stable software product with support to back it up. Even though there have been some serious security problems since its release I believe Windows XP was a huge improvement over previous versions of Windows which justifies the current hassles with the Microsoft product activation feature.

With Symantec's 2004 products you now have a buggy and annoying product activation feature and increasingly sluggish and bloated software that significantly decreases the speed of even the latest 2 to 3 Ghz computers. The question is why would they do this ? Only the Symantec marketing and development departments can answer that question.

Thankfully we live in a diverse capitalist society that allows for competition. Needless to say I jumped off the Norton ship this year in favor of a speedier and more hastle free product in the name of McAfee Antivirus 2004. After my Norton 2003 subscription ran out I uninstalled the entire Norton System Works Pro 2003 program and I installed the new McAfee Antivirus 2004 on my notebook running Windows XP Home. I still use Zone Alarm Pro 4 for a software firewall. Compared with running Norton 2003 I could not believe the improvement in system speed with McAfee. The new McAfee and Zone Alarm Pro seems to be the right combination for me now and when my Norton subscription runs out on my 2.4 Ghz desktop system I will very likely will change that computer to the new McAfee Antivirus program also.

It is too bad that Symantec effectively messed up one of the best antivirus products on the market. If you are running Norton 2003 or earlier and do not want to change to McAfee you might want to simply extend your subscription service for one or two more years and save yourself the hassle of buying the retail boxed version of Norton AV 2004. I know that I am not the only customer that feels this way about Norton AV 2004 and I hope that Symantec learns from its mistakes and returns to offering what customers really want with the next System Works Pro 2005 and Antivirus 2005 version release.

I've used Norton Antivirus for several years and loved it. But this year they decided to add product activation. I hit the bug a lot of people have hit where if you have windows xp and your system is a certain way, it will keep reactivating everytime you reboot until it finally disables itself. Symantec has no solution to this at this time (several weeks after they discovered it). I finally ended up getting a refund (after going through about 10 phone numbers).

This is the second Symantec product I've purchased over the last few years. After hours on the phone with Symantec "support" and more hours surfing their "award winning" support site (who gave them this award and what were they smoking?!), I vowed never again to own a Symantec product.(...)AntiVirus may be a fabulous virus detection, prevention, and elimination product once you get it installed and functioning correctly, but doing so takes an absurd amount of effort. There is a conflict with a standard Windows XP update, so you can't even install without removing that update, installing AV, then reinstalling the update. Once installation was complete, I couldn't activate it for no apparent reason ("Not a valid A8Key"). Turns out AV couldn't get to the Symantec servers, even though I could surf anywhere else I wanted to. No solution for opening ports or anything, you just have to call for phone support (limited hours, M-F only). After 30+ minutes on hold, I had to read the product key (24 alpha-numeric chars) then write down the activation key (34 alpha-numeric chars). Now it's supposedly activated, but it's causing issues with MS Outlook, LiveUpdate won't work, the icon disappears from the system tray, and I can't launch/configure the program once the icon is gone. Solution? Uninstall and reinstall Symantec Norton AntiVirus.

Avoid this product like the plague.

First let me say I own a consulting company and am a Cisco Certified Network Professional and a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

Second let me say in the last 2 days Norton AntiVirus has destroyed two windows installations on two seperate systems. The first system was a Windows XP system and the second system was a windows 98 system.

The installation performed flawlessly, however after reboot XP was unable to find necessary system files. The system was viress free and stable before the install.

The 98 system functionaled normally until a liveupdate updated the core package of norton antivirus, it then also refused to boot.

The problems that people are having with this product are not from them messing up the install, they are with a legimiate and dangerous problem with the product.

I have sent Symantantec a letter but they are already aware of the problem, do not dismiss this problem lightly or you may find yourself reformatting your computer.

A software program should never contaminate or destroy an os, with this in mind I am not able to recommend this product to anyone.

Installed Norton Antivirus 2004 Pro on 5 workstations and activated them successfully. 3 of the workstations kept bringing up a warning about configuration not being completed by administrator when a user logged in. 2 workstations didn't have this warning, but web surfing on those workstations became painfully slow. Norton on all workstations was setup exactly the same way.

There is no free tech support for installation. Symantec puts out a buggy program and expects the user to pay just to talk to them. So you'll pay $40 to buy the software and $25 to talk to them and maybe get your problem resolved. Anyway, 2004 pro is terrible in my opinion. Besides that Symantec wants to charge for installation tech support.

If you need antivirus for your home computers use AVG from grisoft.com. I use this on all 3 of my home computers and have never had a software conflict with any program including games.

Purchased this product as it represented a good value given you can install it on two computers.

First tried to install on a Windows 2000 machine but couldn't get the program to download the new virus definitions and other updates.

Installed it on a XP Pro machine and everything went well. A few weeks later a message pops up saying the trial period is over and I need to activate the program. Huh? I already did that.

Anyway, I enter the product key and cannot get it to activate. Call support and they give me a new product key. Try that and can't get it activated. Call again and they do a over the phone activation with me. Get a message saying the activation was successful, hang up the phone with the rep and start the program -- I get the same trial period expired message. Program is still disabled.

Call again, this time do a automated phone activation but still no luck. Still looking for a solution ...

Read a lot of negative comments on Norton products. Should have heeded those reviews. I'm running AVG, the free version, for now.

When NAV 2004 first came out I gave it four stars, but I now rescind that positive review completely. The program has been a total resource hog in the last two months and, to my great dismay last week, it actually missed catching a virus! The culprit was the "auto update" thing which hadn't worked for a long time! This is the worst piece of software I've come across. I downloaded a free version of Panda Anti-Virus last week and it was able to catch and clean the virus without a hitch.

NAV sucks and I'll never buy another product from Symantec again.

I have been using Norton Antivirus 2004 for a few days now, and I don't seem to be having too many problems. Yes, I did notice a small slow down when I try to shut down my computer, but it wasn't all that much. I was pretty skeptical about purchasing Norton Antivirus 2004 because of all the bad reviews, but it installed and I was able to update it without a problem. It did ask me though to remove any of the old versions on my computer before installing it. It doesn't work all that great with getting rid of the threats of adware, but that's why I use "SpyBot Search and Destroy" and "Spyware blaster" to get rid of some of the spyware and adware on my computer. Both are freeware. They do ask you to make a donation though if you really like the programs, but that's optional. I haven't tried the McAfee Antivirus 2004. So I really can't compare the two. But here are the main pros and cons I saw so far using this program.

Pros:
1. When a virus is detected you can click on it to see an online definition of the virus and how to remove it completely. (Con: Apparently Norton doesn't remove all aspects to a virus, especially if it adds new values to your registry key. So it's a pain having to go through each threat to see if you have to do some manual removal.)
2. Easy to install

Cons:
1. Slows down the computer a little bit
2. Detection of adware threats are not removed easily

Basically it's an overall okay antivirus program, but if you can find one cheaper to just scan for viruses and remove them completely I'd definitely recommend it.

I purchased this software package upon the advice of a friend, who said it is easy to use and trouble free. I will never buy another Symantec product. I recommend McAffe because it works.

Let the games begin:

I spent three days (about 12 hours) trying to get the Norton package to update the virus definitions, which are very critical for keeping the software virus library current. During my long journey, I worked with Symantec's free troubleshooting website and went through every item which may allow me to use the liveupdate, touted to be simple by Symantec. Through it all, I completely removed the software and any evidence that Norton/Symantec exists on my computer, at the websites advice, then did a reinstall- Nope. I downloaded the "intelligent" update from the website - an oxymoron which I could not open. After many other attempts with removes and reloads, I called technical assistance.

These tech assistance guys are bozo's! They referred me to the same web pages and procedures which I spend hours noodling through. After I told them none of it works they said they had a few other things I could try, but they would not tell me what they are unless I give them $29.95 for their fee based assistance. My gosh, this is brand new software!

I immediately called customer assistance to get my money back. They have said they will send me an e-mail instructing me to destroy the software, and send them certain items from the packaging to verify my purchase so they can refund me. I have yet to see the e-mail but I will give them another business day.

After all of this, as a farewell $#%@, I had to remove the Symantec product from my computer. This time everything locked up and I could no longer see my control panel icons. This forced me to reinstall and then remove the Norton anti-virus once again.

Now I have dowloaded a $2.95/month MCAffee service from AOL. It worked the first time without trouble. Thanks Symantec! I bet you are filing Chapter #11 soon. Investors and users beware.