Norton 360

I've been a user of Norton Antivirus for over a decade now (I think I bought it when I joined Earthlink back in 1995?). A couple of the releases have sucked (2006 had to be reinstalled every couple of months after a failed dictionary upgrade for example)

My subscription was up this weekend so I went an bought an upgrade to Norton 360 this weekend at Best Buy. They had for $10 less than online. Plus I was there getting a WII Fit and Mario Kart ;-)

First I had trouble uninstalling the old versions on both PCs. Eventually found a tool on the Symantec site to remove ALL products. This tool even found left overs from 2004 versions. With them gone, the install went pretty smooth.

First thing I noticed was the difference in memory footprint. Easily 150 MB smaller with the new version installed than with 2008. I also noticed that the disk thrashing has stopped. To the point that the disk on my main desktop isn't spinning at all, and sometimes goes into powersaving mode. That NEVER happened with the previous version.

This version also has an anti-spam gateway, firewall and anti-malware systems. They've also bundled the disk defragmenter from the standalone tools product.

Odd thing is they added an on-line (Internet) backup tool. I've been using Mozy for a month now (I'll write about it next week after I test restore some files.) I have 20 GB backed up and the Norton tool comes with 2 GB free, but I didn't use it.

I also kicked off a full system scan, then did email and surfed. I didn't notice any delay. In the past the machine was worthless when it was scanning.

Only downside: Norton 360 doesn't like Windows Defender. Not sure why, I'll research that some more, but it told me to uninstall it before it could install.