Norton Internet Security 2006 Review

Good Points
It looks the part and came as standard on my HP PC, so no setup time

Bad Points
Clearly very buggy.
I cannot believe how bad it has been

General Comments
This came on my HP Sempron, but I have generally ignored it until one year later when I moved it to be my internet PC. This is the version with full virus checking. I had a strong incentive to stick with it as I did not want to have to uninstall it and find another product. When I started having troubles I wondered if it was somehow me, and popped into this site. Having seen it scored 1.1 out of 10.0 I was inclined to believe that these were real difficulties. For a start the console does not really work. I did not want to have Norton scan my outgoing mail, so I selected the option to stop this. To make sure I went on to stop "all" virus scanning completely, but this made no difference and Norton continued to scan everything, even though it said it was not. The same is true with the firewall and internet security, which was always on regardless of what it said the status was. This was irritating as Norton slowed things up. I load a JPG from my disk to edit and I have to wait while Norton scans it.



I tried really hard to keep this product, hoping it might somehow come right. The final straw was when I installed a Windows security update and found I could no longer receive mail, as it failed to connect to the server I had been using for years (all tweaks tried, including "off" with Norton to no avail.)



I finally lost patience and removed it from my system. Magic! now my PC can pick up my mail, and also my PC now runs very smoothly. no more waiting to read my own documents pending a "Request for virus scan". This is probably the most satisfactory software installation change I have ever made.



By the way, I run a software developer company and am a long term engineer, so am not a newbie. This currently gets my "worst ever" rating for any piece of software ever.