Norton questions

Flakie

Hello. I have Norton 360 deluxe installed on my PC. It came with the PC as a trial and I renewed it. Over the past few months there have been a few glitches with the PC and I have had offers of add ons from Norton which one or more seem to have sorted the issues out. I probably had a knee jerk reaction to the issues and downloaded stuff I didn’t really need. I have now had my subscription renewal through and of course all these add ons have been included. What I would like advice on is whether these things are necessary as they don’t come included with any of their main products. My renewal price is nearly £200. What I have is as follows - identity protection, secure VPN, cloud backup, password manager, utilities ultimate and driver update. The PC is relatively new. Do I need any of these products? The PC is used a lot for gaming for my husband, mainly strategy games such as Rome Total War and War Thunder and I use it for general admin and banking. I can’t afford to tender it vulnerable and hubby would kill me if I jeopardised his games! I’d really appreciate some help please. Thank you.  

oldernonethewiser

Do you use many, any or all of the things you signed up for?

MattMattMattUK

Flakie said:

Hello. I have Norton 360 deluxe installed on my PC. It came with the PC as a trial and I renewed it. Over the past few months there have been a few glitches with the PC and I have had offers of add ons from Norton which one or more seem to have sorted the issues out. I probably had a knee jerk reaction to the issues and downloaded stuff I didn’t really need. I have now had my subscription renewal through and of course all these add ons have been included. What I would like advice on is whether these things are necessary as they don’t come included with any of their main products. My renewal price is nearly £200. What I have is as follows - identity protection, secure VPN, cloud backup, password manager, utilities ultimate and driver update. The PC is relatively new. Do I need any of these products? The PC is used a lot for gaming for my husband, mainly strategy games such as Rome Total War and War Thunder and I use it for general admin and banking. I can’t afford to tender it vulnerable and hubby would kill me if I jeopardised his games! I’d really appreciate some help please. Thank you.  

Cancel Norton, uninstall everything from Norton on your PC, apps, browser add-ins, then use the Norton uninstall tool to properly remove things, then never ever ever install anything from Norton ever again. 

Windows inbuilt protection is more than adequate, you do not need to pay for anything additional and whether it even offers you protection is debatable in most people's eyes. 

Eyeful

1. Norton pays the computer manufactures to have it  come preinstalled on the PC

2. Understand this, no security software is perfect. It cannot guarantee to protect you from all malware 
The weakest point in the system is the human using the computer and the way they use it.

3. If you have a Windows PC it already comes with it own security software, which should be more than adequate.
You only need to remove Norton and then confirm that Windows Security is turned on.
https://www.av-test.org/en/antivirus/home-windows/

4. How many of these add on's do you actually use or need.
You can get a very good free VPN from Proton.
You can get a very good free Password Manager from either Proton or Bitwarden.

5. Remember to regularly back up your computer contents to an external hard drive.

6. With Norton they will always try to up sell you something, if you need it or not.

Flakie

Oh wow! Amazing answers! All I can say is that after installing one of them, I think it was the drivers, hubby’s game stopped crashing so I assumed it was doing some good. I think it was a knee jerk reaction to be honest that I kept taking them on but with hindsight it was a bit silly. I’m not so tech savvy I have to confess (how can you tell?!!) which is why I have asked on here. You all agree on one thing - that I don’t really need Norton and Windows can do the job. I’m always careful about logging off properly with banking etc which is the most crucial thing I do on there so I can absolutely take on board what you have all said. And I will do as you suggest so thank you so much for the sound advice and suggestions. Truly appreciate it. 👏😄😃😄

Vitor

You can obtain perfectly good protection on a Windows machine using -

1) Windows Defender for AV with all protection features set to on. Remove bloatware like Norton, McAfee
2) Switch on all web protection features in Edge/Chrome
3) Set your home router to using a filtering DNS what blocks known malware sites (e.g. Quad9, Cloudflare etc.)

Eyeful

Flakie  You wrote:  "The PC is relatively new".

1. I am assuming that this new PC is running Windows 11.
 If so you are OK to use the Windows Security as all here have stated.

2. If it is still using Windows 10, then you need to update to Windows 11 as soon as possible.

3. If your PC is unable to update to Windows 11, come back and tell us.

Frozen_up_north

Another vote for Bitwarden, and the built-in Windows security is fine

Grey_Critic

I gave up on the paid for AVs a long time ago finding them intrusive moved to Defender and it works fine - Do use AdBlock and do not visit anything dodgy,

bob2302

Eyeful said:

Flakie  You wrote:  "The PC is relatively new".

2. If it is still using Windows 10, then you need to update to Windows 11 as soon as possible.

There's no hurry, you can get another year of security updates for a modest fee or by syncing your settings to an MS account. Old stable software with security updates is arguably a lower risk than new software getting feature updates.