Is it really that bad? What do you use?

Symantic antivirus here. They only offer it for business I think though.

Both Symantec and Norton suck. Badly. I highly recommend one of the free anti-virus products out there -- I use AVG myself, but I've also heard good things about Avast! .

Seriously, Norton, McAfee, and Symantec are utter crap nowadays. Huge bloat, amazingly slow, and they don't protect any better than the free (for home use) products.

I've installed AVG and avast on my brothers and moms comp. They are computer newbs and dont know how to keep from getting infected. Those programs have NEVER stopped the comps from getting 100+ viruses within a month. (seriously I dont know how they accomplish this feat)

I believe what happens is that the virus' take over the program and disable it, because once I get to the comps, the virus software is destroyed basically.

I installed Symantec on them last month, and no issues yet. I like Symantec because its so minimalistic. One program, entirly based on virus scanning, no firewall, spyware, internet crap, just a virus scanner, I will handle the rest. Also it absolutely never pops up anything besides scheduled scans, and when it finds an infection. I cant think of any reasons as to why it would be considered bloatware, but then again its not Norton Antivirus.

There's a lot of pieces to the Symantec suite so I could see how it could be called Bloatware. It's very hard to disable and get it completely out of memory. Hell, it's pretty hard just to get it to uninstall. I have had numerous problems with various versions of Norton that had the installer fail and then would not run again, nor would it allow a new version to be installed.

Norton is pushing away from "just antivirus" and going into "we fix everything," and it's a pain in the ass in a lot of cases. For instance, its firewall program that is installed blocks local network traffic. You can see other computers. You can ping them. They can't ping you. I can understand this to a point when it comes to internet security, but blocking local traffic?

Lets also keep in mind that Symantec antivirus is not Norton Antivirus.

Same company, different virus programs. I'm sure they use the same virus definitions, no harm there, but Norton is in a whole nother league of its own and should definitly be considered bloatware. No way in hell I would put that trash on any computer I own.

we use McAfee at work...their anti-spyware is a joke..never catches a thing. And their anti-virus breaks a lot of our apps so its a pain to have to install it last..or disable/re-enable...etc

Personally, I have found Sophos Antivirus to be an excellent choice. In the last year or so they have completely revamped their interface and made the updates much more user-friendly.

They have a free 30 day eval. on their website, if you can find it...it's kind of hidden in there somewhere.

Here's the link:
http://www.sophos.com/products/es/sav/eval/standalone

I've been using it on my PC, as well as my parents'/friends'/other-illiterate-PC-user-aquaintances' and have yet to hear of anyone getting infected.

Whenever I work on anyone's PC and see Norton/Symantec/McAfee, I let them know that unless they are EXTREMELY attached to the program it will be removed first and foremost:)

-Proboscis

---edit: fixed spelling

This comment was edited on Feb 13, 01:30.