Kaspersky v Norton

CJx_2

Much like most other people here, I agree that Norton is very bloated.
I personally am not too much of a fan of Kaspersky either (having been forced to use it for work). As a warning, if your settings for Kaspersky are really bad it can also cause your computer to grind to a halt when doing a full scan too.

Chuffy

johnmc wrote: »

Open a bank account with Barclays and register for internet banking. Leave a pound in there and get Kaspersky 2010 for "free" with an annual upgrade.

I have Kaspersky on my laptop and am very happy with it, much better than the McAfee it came with.

2 PC's have free AV's, but they are OLD and creaky.

Agreed, but don't forget that Kaspersky is also a 3 user licence so you can share it with family if you don't have more than machine.

jaylay_2

Chuffy wrote: »

Agreed, but don't forget that Kaspersky is also a 3 user licence so you can share it with family if you don't have more than machine.

Thats as long as you purchase the 3 user license version. There is a 1 licence version about as well!. I run Kaspersky as well. Have used Norton in the past as well as Mcafee. I agree that Norton seems resource hungry and I didnt find Mcafee very user friendly. I am very happy with Kaspersky. I purchased it through a company selling via amazon. Ordered it late afternoon and it arrived next morning and was half the price Tesco wanted to charge.

PhilGP

I’ve been working in IT for 25 years and have seen many AV packages come and go.
In the beginning there were a few small programs to check for specific viruses but without internet and email, the problem went unnoticed for a few years. Most problems got passed around by salesmen and support engineers travelling around and sharing floppy disks!

When things started picking up Norton were the first big name on the scene and have always been there. Without any other comparisons, there product was accepted by many people and it did what it said on the tin. Obviously as things developed with college email systems growing then Norton kept changing and others appeared. Nothing ever seemed to match Norton.
With the growth of the internet in home use more big names appeared like McAfee, Sophos, and in recent years F-Secure, Kapersky and many others.

Using AV and Firewall software also caused problems in the early days. ZoneAlarm was always a big name and I tried a few but nothing matched it. Now, most solutions offer AV, Firewall, Spam, etc, etc in a single package – is this a good thing ? … sometimes it’s best to use one source for all of this, sometime not ! Some of the performance issues could be with the firewall and not the AntiVirus components – i.e. Norton AV could be fast but Norton Firewall very slow.

About 8 years ago the Norton product started to get bloated and hog resources. It got a reputation for being difficult to uninstall (it wasn’t really difficult, just not straight forward). It then had a better couple of years where it got faster but still much tied into Windows. Then again it got slower and slower. The newer products have avoided these issues and played on Norton’s bad reputation. From that point onwards, Nortons name was mud – both for home users and IT professionals.

I haven’t used Norton products for 2 years now so can’t comment on their latest efforts – they may have improved things to compete again.
I have only used Kapersky on Windows 7 but in a clean environment so I don’t know how it really performs when being attacked. The interface and options are clear but maybe not to a novice.

In a business environment I have used (and liked) Sophos as it has a multi-tiered solution that works very well – good set of options and reporting, with passive updates to virus definitions.
At home I have used F-Secure for the past 4 years (free from Barclays at the time) and I think it is excellent. I use the full Internet Security (2010) package providing AntiVirus, Spam, Firewall etc. On top of that, I make sure my emails go through a spam filter before they even got to my PC..

Whatever system you choose, make sure you keep it updated. A good system should never be more than a day or two old.
With Windows make sure you get your regular security updates. Microsoft are fixing code all the time and release their latest fixes every month. They are available around 11pm on the second Tuesday of every month. If you have your auto updates set for the early hours of the morning, then my breakfast the next day you should be updated.
The security updates will often address issues that could arise from internet attacks – something your firewall may not block yet.

So, my answer to the original question – Norton vs Kapersky …. I would choose Kapersky. If the question was ‘which package’, I would say F-Secure.

iviv

As mentioned before in the thread, there is no 'best' AV program. Different people have different opinions, most often based on the one they use. Personally, I use ESET's smart security, and would recommend it to others, especially since I was able to just email them and got a student discount!

If you want something more solid, check out [url=http://www.av-comparatives.org/[/url] and hit the Comparatives/Reviews link on the left. That gives you a list of different tests including performance and detection rates for all of the main AV products and some lesser known ones as well, so you can figure out which you want. Though as also mentioned, AV programs can get better and worse.

Also, not all AV programs are fool proof. With heuristic scanning, which basically looks for files that aren't known viruses, but seem to be acting like viruses, there have been some major false positives. I don't think I'd be wrong in saying that over the years, every major AV has found and quarentined critical windows files at one time or another. Only thing you can really do about this is to either keep backups, in case the 1 in amillion chance of a major false positive happens, or disable heuristic scanning, which would work, though would leave your system more vulnerable. Its a tough call!

Biggles

I finally got rid of Norton a couple of years ago.

* It had two separate user interfaces (I had no idea why, neither of them were self-explanatory).
* Sometimes it sat there prompting me for a 'Live Update' for no apparent reason, the rest of the time it did it in the background as it was supposed to.
* After a program update, it always restarted the PC, even when you wanted to close it down.
* Every time I powered down, Windows always had to intervene to shut Norton down as though it was not responding.
* The uninstall took 15 minutes. Gave various unexplained errors in doing so. LiveUpdate Notice and LiveUpdate were two separate progs and needed to be uninstalled separately. The former gave a 'fatal error'.
* It left a huge number of files to be removed manually.
* My replacement prog (Kaspersky) took 2 minutes to install, only has one user interface and it makes sense!

No way will I go back to a firm that disregards its users in that way.

emmalj_3

Hi, hope you don't mind me jumping in here. I work for Norton, and we're really interested to hear your feedback. We actually agree with many of you - a few years ago our software was really slow, and customers weren't happy. So we completely re-engineered the software and now we have third party independent testers showing that Norton 2010 is the fastest internet security software available - this report can be seen at passmark.com

Like many of you say, however, it's down to personal choice and personal need. If you want a internet security suite that protects you against phishing, trojans, spyware, malicious websites and other threats, has a firewall, and has customer support as part of the product, then (obviously) we'd recommend something like our software. There are many options out there though and lots of reviews so do take a look at Passmark or Av-comparatives or the computing magazine websites for reviews and pick the software that suits you.

Thanks... Emma

[Deleted User]

emmalj wrote: »

If you want a internet security suite that protects you against phishing, trojans, spyware, malicious websites and other threats, has a firewall, and has customer support as part of the product, then (obviously) we'd recommend something like our software.

The main problem with all in one suites such as what Norton offer is that they offer very little real world protection, but they're wrapped up with so much that a consumer is left with very little clue about what is effective and what is not. Everything other than the virus scanner in an all in one suite is ineffective and not necessary. That goes for phising filters and firewalls.

Most of the simple and free anti virus programs are more than sufficient, and changing your DNS servers to point at OpenDNS will give you an additional layer of security that will protect you from phising, you do not need the overhead of link checkers to do that for you.

Software firewalls, especially those that are host-based, are ineffective full stop. They offer no additional protection but give the overall impression they do. A false sense of security is worse than having no security at all.

Dr_Beaker

I had Norton 360, I’ve now removed it as it was constantly going wrong, the final time Norton support told me I must have a virus because they couldn’t fix it. They wanted me to pay for them to find this “virus” something Norton 360 was supposed to protect me from. I refused to pay, even though I had about 170 days left on subscription I removed 360 and bought Kaspersky simply because I’d had enough of the problems with it and to be asked to pay more money was the last straw. The computer now runs faster, a full scan takes approx. 10 minutes (an hour with Norton) and so far Kaspersky has been 100% reliable. The only thing I miss with 360 is that it used to fill in blanks for me (like email addresses and passwords), but it’s a small price to pay to be rid of the hassle of Norton. Don’t touch it, it’s all hassle. Go Kaspersky!!

Dr_Beaker

emmalj wrote: »

Hi, hope you don't mind me jumping in here. I work for Norton, and we're really interested to hear your feedback. We actually agree with many of you - a few years ago our software was really slow, and customers weren't happy. So we completely re-engineered the software and now we have third party independent testers showing that Norton 2010 is the fastest internet security software available - this report can be seen at passmark.com

Like many of you say, however, it's down to personal choice and personal need. If you want a internet security suite that protects you against phishing, trojans, spyware, malicious websites and other threats, has a firewall, and has customer support as part of the product, then (obviously) we'd recommend something like our software. There are many options out there though and lots of reviews so do take a look at Passmark or Av-comparatives or the computing magazine websites for reviews and pick the software that suits you.

Thanks... Emma

Sorry Emma, Customer support is useless, it's now done from India and they appear to be totally incompetent, if the fault is outside their checklist, as was the case with me, they haven't a clue what to do.

Dr. Beaker.