Symantec Product Norton AntiVirus

Symantec makes Norton AntiVirus. Since its creation in 1990, over 100 million people around the world have used Norton AntiVirus. The early versions of Norton AntiVirus were integrated and took much from Central Point Anti-Virus, which was acquired by Symantec in 1994. Central Point Anti-Virus was also integrated into the the Microsoft Anti-Virus utility.

Norton AntiVirus has a reputation within parts of the computer enthusiast community as being a slow and inefficient program that can, at times, be ineffective and difficult to uninstall. There have even been some computer professionals have reported encountering computers infected with a virus despite having Norton AntiVirus installed and fully up-to-date.

The Norton AntiVirus software’s graphical user interface is not based on the standard Microsoft Windows graphic interface library. Norton AntiVirus uses the Internet Explorer rendering engine.

There are numerous complaints about Norton AntiVirus. The Washington Post accused Norton AntiVirus maker Symantec of having worst average response times for providing virus definition updates. They based their report on the worst virus outbreaks of 2005. The Washington Post reported that Norton AntiVirus lagged behind every major competitor, including Kaspersky, AVG and McAfee.

The Norton AntiVirus released in 2004 was the first Norton Antivirus product to include an anti-copying feature called "Product Activation”. “Product Activation” is similar to the activation process for Windows XP and Office XP. The activation process for the Norton



AntiVirus products released after 2004 can be accomplished over the Internet or by phone.

Computers made after 2005 often include a free sixty day trial of Norton AntiVirus. After the free 60 day trial of Norton AntiVirus has expired on a new computer, the Norton Antivirus firewall, virus protection and security alerts automatically stop. This is only bad because the Windows Security firewall and Security alerts were shut off due to redundancy with Norton AntiVirus.

Norton AntiVirus does not tell users how to restore the Windows firewall and security alerts. It does, however, give daily messages to remind the user that the computer has no virus protection and should buy Norton AntiVirus from the Symantec website immediately.


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