Hat Monster on Norton Products

Linky

AntiVirus
This is the biggest piece of shit I've ever had the misfortune to use. It's so utterly revolting that Symantec dropped the Norton name for their corporate product.

It does not know when to stop. It hooks into every tiny nook and cranny of your system peeping constantly for anything that looks vaguely semi-suspicious and then, if it finds anything (and it will...) OI! YOU! USER! STOP WHAT THE FUCK YOU'RE DOING! I'M MORE IMPORTANT! I DON'T CARE ABOUT YOUR IMPORTANT REPORT, I WANT ATTENTION NOW!

It's rude, attention seeking and self-gratifying bullshit. Like a three year old child, but without the cuteness factor.

You can tell that long long ago, it was a slim, well performing and well natured product (roughly 1996). Then it went on a diet of pure 100% fat.

Superior Products:
Avast! Antivirus (Alwil Software)
AVG
Trend
F-Prot
Kasperski

Internet Security
Astute readers will be comparing AOL already after the AntiVirus entry. AOL nowadays is rather well behaved, though. NAV isn't.
I've known UTTER NOVICES throw their hands up in disgust when NIS claims that their computer is attacking itself. There's absolutely no need to be molesting loopback traffic. Certainly not labelling them "RPC Attacks".
It's entirely possible to render your machine non-functional by clicking what NIS recommends. Say you have a front-end application and a service which it communicates with (O&O Defrag is a prime example). Normally, it'll use RPC traffic loopbacked over Winsock. NIS will molest this and, potentially, the service will hang since it didn't recieve data it was expecting. It has no business doing that!

Worse still, NIS will monitor and filter HTTP traffic. More than one user has known their IE to become very unstable due to this. Firefox is also vulnerable, joined by Avant, Maxthon, Opera, you name it. NIS fucks with them.

Just like NAV, it'll pop up with some totally trivial "attack" and it'll be like the Weekly World News. Tabloid application. It'll refuse to go away until you've satisfied its attention request and, again, it deems itself more important than you.

Nothing is more important than the user! He is your lord and master. Symantec would be wise to realise this.

Superior Products:
WindowsXP SP2
WindowsXP SP1
WindowsXP
A router with NAT
Kerio 2.x


Both
Together, they're a total disaster. They mess up so much of the system that they cannot be safely removed. Indeed, Symantec's uninstaller generally leaves the services installed and available, just set on Manual. Sometimes it doesn't even do that. If one of them stops working, you're in VERY deep trouble, yet they're so big and fat and clumsy that they're going to fall over sooner or later. When a program is demanding to inspect all network traffic, but it's not working, the network traffic is going absolutely nowhere.

Conclusion
Even AOL were forced to tone down their abuse of a machine. Rumour has it that Microsoft were not happy about being given a bad name for crashes and disfunctionality which AOL were causing.
Symantec are being rude, obtrusive and aren't doing what they're asked to. Both of their products covered here consistently rate mediocre in tests while small, fast and unobtrusive applications rate higher.
The sheer amount of scaremongering causes users to enter a condition which we've been fighting for years: Don't be scared, you won't break it!
It scares the user into obedience - Anyone knows a scared person is an obedient person. The message? "Buy my next version"