My anti virus software on my home PC expired.  I considered renewing it but decided to purchase Norton Antivirus instead.  Bad idea.

Symanetc easily took my money and the download was easy.  It sent me the registration keys in email and I saved the email.  I made sure it was saved somewhere reliable so that if my PC died, I would still have the keys.  No problem there.

Installing

I started up the installation procedure and it went fine at first.  Then it wanted me to create a “norton account”.  I don’t know about you, but I have enough accounts with passwords to fill a dictionary.  And I could conceive of no reason a product like this would REQUIRE me to create such an account. I can understand suggesting such an account.  I can even understand being somewhat of a pain to get new users to create such an account.  However it should not require such an account.  I checked their web site.  There was a question on the FAQ page talking about the norton account.  It talked about having an account was a good idea because they stored your keys for you.  I had no need for that.  My keys were saved and I was highly confident that I would be fine.  No where does it say how to get the product installed without creating the account.  The clever programmers at Symantec figured out a way to bring up a window that I could not get rid of.  And I know a thing or two about how to deal with programs that won’t let me do things my way.  At that point it ate up almost all my CPU.  I got so frustrated that tI uninstalled the darn thing.  I was now without protection.  When I went through the uninstall process, I was redirected to a site and asked to say why I was uninstalling it.  I provided an explanation and my email address.  No reply from them yet.

I did not use the PC much but the idea of it being unprotected was always on my mind. I decided that I would go ahead and create the norton account and install the software.  I went through the process and got it installed.  I ran the Live Update so that it had all the current virus definitions.

The first thing I found obnoxious about this product is the CPU usage.  It has a CPU usage indicator on the main screen.  And it seems like this is always set to 100%.  I cannot vouch for the accuracy of this meter, but it appears to match the Windows Task Manger.

I even disabled it by right clicking on the tray icon and it still showed 99-100 CPU usage.

I tried turning off every feature and it still showed 99% CPU usage.

Email Checking

I went through all the configurations to customize it for my uses.  I only use web mail so I normally turn off any email protection.  I don’t need it wasting my computer resources for no reason.  When I did that, the tray icon changed, adding a red exclamation.  To me that indicates a real problem.  Yet, this was caused when I changed a setting myself.  I discovered that there is a way to tell the product to ignore this setting.  There is a little “i” icon on the main screen.  This slides out a window to the right with an “Ignore” button on it.  Clicking this will make the product ignore the fact that this feature is turned off.

Fix Now

I have noticed that when the product sees something it does not like, it activates the Fix Now button.  However, it does not tell you what it is going to fix.  And once you click the button, it fixes everything it thinks is wrong.  I can understand having a one-click fix button.  However, there should be a way to allow or disallow the “fixes”.  Several programs have scenarios like this and they present the list of items they want to fix with checkboxes next to them.  The user can allow or disallow each fix individually.

Please note that the Norton program automatically tries to fix the issue when it counters the issue and it is not possible to find the exact error message when an encounter the issue.

A simple log would be sufficient for this.  Even if it were only available in “expert” mode.   This product does not have an “expert” mode.

Scheduling Activities

I leave my computer on almost all the time.  If I am going to be away for several days, then I will shut it down.  And I generally like to schedule things like backups and scans for 3AM - 6AM.  I searched for how to do that with norton antivirus.  I would like it to download new virus definitions and do any scans during that time.  However, the only thing I could schedule was a full scan.  It seems to me that it wants to detect that the computer is not being used by detecting mouse movement and keyboard activity.  Because I am not actively sitting at my computer does not mean it is not in use.  If I am uploading hundreds of images, I usually don’t sit and watch them.  And I would not want anything to get in the way of that upload.   Idleness should be optional.

I asked this question to symantec support and got the following response.

Please note that LiveUpdate cannot be scheduled in the Norton AntiVirus 2009 but you can select the Norton program whether to run the LiveUpdate automatically or manually.

What this means is that you can set the update to run manually.  Then you can get up at 3AM to manually click the button to make it run.

Norton Account

I decided to see if I could delete my norton account.  No luck there.  I sent them an email asking how to do it.

Please note that Norton cannot be deleted if created. Norton account will save your product information and you can have the information from your Norton account if you have lost the information in your computer.

I already knew this.  This is actually useless information.  In my opinion, this is unacceptable.  All systems should allow users to delete their accounts.

Support

I had several questions so I looked for support options.  There were two options that seemed to suit me.  I could email the questions and get an answer within 24 hours.  I was fine with that.  I wrote up my questions and sent them off.  The other option was to do live chat.  I decided to try it.  My first attempt did not work because I use Firefox browser and NoScript which prevents JavaScript fromrunning on a site unless I specifically allow it.  I turned on JavaScript for their site and tried again.  This time it complained about a browser problem and proceeded to tell me that it only worked in Internet Explorer.  I am sorry Symantec, I do not use Internet Explorer.  And I don’t understand why they would not support Firefox.  I am still waiting on their email reply but it has only been an hour.  I will file an update when I get it.

The following was from Symantec support.

Please note that Symantec is working on this issue to support the Mozilla browser for chat and the issue will be fixed soon.

Conclusion

Norton Antivirus is a very annoying program.  I am going to give it some time to see how obnoxious it really is.