By Dennis O’Reilly Readers beg to differ with the reviews of top tech magazines that recently named Norton Internet Security 2009 the best security suite.
Whether the security apps are from Symantec, McAfee, or some lesser-known vendor, our readers point fingers at them as the source of many performance and connectivity problems.
Ryan Russell’s Feb. 26 Top Story updated the WS Security Baseline by reporting that Symantec’s Norton Internet Security 2009 was the top choice of three prominent technology publishers: PC World, PCMag.com, and Maximum PC. A reader by the name of Manny is less impressed with this product — much less impressed:
- “Having been a Norton customer for many years now, I was delighted at the smooth installation of the new version NIS 2009. This was on a Windows XP SP3 four-user peer-to-peer network that had been running NIS 2008 very positively for a year. One day was left on the subscription, so based on the rave reviews, we decided to upgrade to NIS 2009. What a mistake.
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“Much to my disappointment, my customer started to have major problems with his network. All of a sudden, whenever someone would click a mapped drive, the system would lock, forcing a reboot. It would work for a few minutes until a file was needed from another PC, then it would lock again. Sometimes a strange message would pop up that the network is not available, etc. (The one PC in this mix that was using ZoneAlarm had no problem.)
“When we called Symantec and spent hours on the phone with their support people, they were in complete denial of the problem. ‘It’s a Microsoft problem’ was all they could tell me. When I searched the Web for this problem — ‘NAV 2009 blocks access to hard disk’ — I found a 14-page user forum on this ‘unsolved’ problem. Yet [the Symantec reps] had the nerve to say to me, ‘It’s a Microsoft problem.’ To prove them wrong, we uninstalled NIS 2009 and reinstalled NIS 2008 and it works perfectly.
“This is the first time I’m writing you, and I must say your newsletter is the best of the best. Keep up the great work.”
- “I read and use your information constantly — thank you. However, parroting the leading PC magazines on their findings does your readers a disservice. I have been in the computer repair business for 21 years and I certainly don’t have all the answers, but about 70% of my business these days is cleaning up infected computers.
“In my book, Symantec hasn’t put out a decent product since they bought out Peter Norton. I don’t care about the claims, in my opinion Norton doesn’t do a good job of protecting people. In the last wave of the UPS/CNN/Virtumonde infection, many people with Norton, McAfee, AVG, and Trend got hammered.
“The only decent antivirus on the market today is NOD32 by ESET [more info]. It stops virtually everything. When it comes to spyware, only two products are worth looking at: Spy Sweeper by Webroot [more info] and Spyware Doctor by PC Tools [more info].
“It seems that every reviewer is looking only at suites when in fact, if you want the best protection, select individual products that offer far better protection. You can be pennywise and pound foolish — in the end, you’ll end up paying people like me to fix your problems.”
A vote for Microsoft’s file-sync service
The five sync services reviewed by Scott Dunn in the Feb. 26 Best Software column (paid content) offered something for everyone. However, that didn’t stop Mark Vozzo from writing in to tell us of his favorite sync tool, which happens to be from a company you may have heard of before:
- “I really enjoyed your article on the sync services. But I was surprised that you didn’t mention Microsoft’s latest sync application that is in beta, called Live Mesh. It’s awesome and works fine with my work and home firewalls. I wasn’t sure if you’ve used or know about it.”
| Readers Manny, Dennis, and Mark will each receive a gift certificate for a book, CD, or DVD of their choice for sending tips we printed. Send us your tips via the Windows Secrets contact page. |
The Known Issues column brings you readers’ comments on our recent articles. Dennis O’Reilly is technical editor of WindowsSecrets.com.
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