| * I'd agree about avoiding anything from Symantec.
| It's all bloated junk.
|
| Ummmm, no, it's not.
|

You've just posted that to three people without
any explanation for your opinion. "Is not!" is not
a post. It's an outburst.

Norton is from Symantec. Symantec first bought
of Peter Norton's system utilities. They started out
as a good product, but gradually got badly bloated.
That's my opinion, but I did use the product for
several years in different versions.

Symantec bought Clean Sweep from Quarterdeck. The
QD product could back up nearly any program into a
single file to be moved to another computer. Symantec
gutted that functionality and added Clean Sweep to
their System Works as an essentially useless, extra
fluff utility.

Symantec bought the AtGuard firewall, which was the
first software I ever bought and is still the best firewall
I ever used. It cost $30 at the time, in 1999. Symantec
added 700+- default exceptions for software to go in
and out. The result was a useless firewall that nevertheless
appeared to work smoothly because one never had to
understand it or adjust it. (It just let nearly all software
through, so there was no muss or fuss. Symantec then
sold that mess for $70, double the AtGuard price, calling
it Norton Internet Security.
That's their typical strategy: Buy a good program, gut it,
wrap it in a pretty, cutting edge, techno-kitsch graphical
interface, then market it heavily and sell it for a bundle.

Symantec bought Drive Image from Powerquest. It
was a good disk imaging program that fit onto a floppy.
By the time Symantec was through with it, Drive Image
was a bloated, useless backup program based on .Net.
(Software reviews for Symantec's DI at the time were
as bad as my description. .Net is similar to Java. The
absurdity of designing a low-level disk utility to run in
Java or .Net -- bloated, high-level languages designed
for sandboxed web services and thus designed to prevent
access to the kind of low-level operations a disk utility
performs -- well, I don't know what to say. Their action
was inexplicable.)

I owned the latter 3 programs before Symantec got
their hands on them. Those programs were so badly
ruined that I had to wonder if Symantec might be making
a back room deal with Microsoft. (Moving software,
stopping corporate spyware and online ads, and making
disk images for OS backup are all things that MS would
prefer not to encourage. They're all things that potentially
reduce "consumer" spending and/or corporate earnings.)

I used Norton AV for many years, but eventually found
that it just required too much resources. (In any case,
the whole idea of AV is out-of-date and of little value.
Years ago there were thousands of viruses and new
definitions came out monthly. These days there are millions
of known viruses. New definitions come out in terms of
hours, not months. And AV software is comparing all of
the files you touch to those millions of unique byte strings.
Meanwhile, many of the attacks that happen are not yet
known malware.)

If you look around online you'll also find that there's a
cottage industry built around removing Norton software.
The only product of theirs that I did think was quite good
was their "speed disk" defragger.

So, those are my reasons for saying Norton is bloated
junk. If you're going to claim "Is not!" then I don't think it's
unreasonable to expect that you'd also have some
reason for that opinion that you can explain.