Rating: Summary: What a PIECE OF CRAP!!! - HORRIBLE experience.... Review: I've been using Norton Utilities since the 80's when it was the only provider of decent disk utilities on the Mac. Since then I've been using Norton products on my PC's for years.But this NIS2004 is a big WASTE OF TIME, DON't BUY OR YOUR LIFE WILL BE HELL. I just spent many DAYS trying to get this thing to work on a modern Sony Viao Pentium 4 laptop, and there is just no way to coax working behavior from it. After days of reading the online support, that's a waste of time as well: "uninstall and reinstall" is about all it comes up with. My problems: 1) NIS does not run on the machine. 2) Fine, I'll run LiveUpdate; they probably released this product before all the bugs were worked out... NOPE! LIVEUPDATE FAILS TOO! And when I look up the error number on their website, guess what?! It's not listed among the hundreds of other problems they have attempted to mitigate. NO WONDER THEY DO NOT OFFER TELEPHONE SUPPORT FREE< they want me to pay them $30 so I can yell at them about the hours and hours I've wasted simply trying to get their software to install and run correctly. 3) UNINSTALL SOFTWARE: NOPE! MUST BE LOGGED INTO NIS AS SUPERUSER. But hey, the damn software won't run! Now I"m into deleting registry entries and files by hand, after looking up the goddam instructions on how to do so. I've uninstalled and reinstalled several times; this is just crazy. NO MORE SYMANTEC PRODUCTS FOR ME! It's a great tool set, IF IT RUNS! THANKS FOR MAKING MY SAT NIGHT A LIVING HELL. I'll go back to 2003 maybe; it was working ok. Forget all this product registration; what a bunch of crap. Make a product that works and SUPPORT IT.
Rating: Summary: Last Symantec purchase ever Review: I've been a loyal Norton/Symantec customer since the DOS version of Norton Utilities. I've purchased every version of Utilities and virus software since. When the definitions for NIS 2003 expired, I bought NIS 2004 from Amazon. Read the installation instructions and followed them. Installation has been a nightmare. I've spent over 8 hours trying to get it to work properly. (That's less time that it took to build the computer and install all the other software that has been running perfectly for 2 years.) I refuse to pay Symantec $29 for telephone tech support for a defective product. When a company produces a flawed product, you would think they would offer free support to get it running. Not Symantec. Their web based tech support is worthless. I'm considering using XP's system restore feature to restore the system to a point before I installed this mess. Those who have gotten this product to work were just lucky. There are plenty of other options out there. Save yourself the grief and avoid Symantec. Given the unusually large number of dissatisfied customers, it is clear that something is wrong with this product, and Symantec prefers to keep taking people's money rather than offering a solution.
Rating: Summary: Powerful Tools - Buggy Review: I have found too many bugs in Norton Internet Security Professional to recommend it to any one without extreme patience and experience. I suspect I will demand my money back, which I have not done with any other software product in the last three years!
Rating: Summary: Rip-Off Review: ... OK, so the program works well. The only problem I have is that there is little support for my local network and file sharing. I basically have to disable the firewall if I want to file share. I had to figure this out as there is no obvious clue from the software. Windows just tells me I do not have privilege to browse the local network. I have a 2.6 Ghz machine with 512M RAM. I don't see the memory problems or the slow down others speak of. It is probably because of the level of machine I have. I would not recommend this for machines less than 1.0 Ghz and less than 256 M RAM.
Rating: Summary: Good but could use improvements Review: I've had it since the virus attack back in May 2003, and for me, it works pretty good (System= 1.7GHz, 640MB RAM). It is memory hog and it did slow my pc a little during start up/ shut down, but no problem with viruses so far.
Rating: Summary: My worst experience since my first marriage! Review: It should be ZERO stars, but that is not an option! In the interest of getting you to read this review I will keep it short. First of all, I concur with the remarks of the following reviewers: To catch a falling star, Total fail, Dissatisfied, and Somebody at Symantec needs to do more work. The only thing I might add is wait until you get the following error message: ErrorMessage: LU1803:LiveUpdate failed while getting your updates. Live update had an internal error while getting your updates. Your Symantec programs were not updated. I did all the things they told me to do on their website to fix this, and I still get the error message. I contacted them, explained this all to them, and they sent me an e-mail telling me to do the things on their website; even after I was perfectly clear I had already done all of that. Add this to all the other problems I have had that are mentioned in other reviews, and you'll wish that you never heard the words Norton Internet Security 2004. Take my advice, find something different, unless you want to end up having to have a professional look at your system to correct the mess. Also, as far as their refund of $30.00, they declined mine, with a postcard, and no recourse to me! They couldn't care less about you or providing service for their products, stay clear of this product. I sure wish I had read these reviews before I wasted my money.
Rating: Summary: Total fail Review: To keep this review short: do not buy and install this software or your life will become a living hell. I installed it in my WinMe system. After installation my computer started to behave irraticaly and non responsive. Advices from tech support (I used other computer to email my problems) did not help because my computer was practicaly not working. After all, I uninstalled NIS and computer worked again, at least enough to let me clean leftovers the uninstall intentionally left in directories and registry! Sombody suggested me to upgrade my system to XP what I did. As you can guess, computer with NIS installed behaved badly again. It could not even activate software via internet becase communication did not work and computer was again practically usless. Finally, after spending more than two hundred dollars and lot of hours I gave up. System, after unistalling NIS, started to work better and after manual cleaning leftovers returned to normal state. It seems the only left from famous Norton utilities is the name and price. Usefulness and quality dissapeared. I wish the Amazon will change the rating setting starting from no stars. I'am rating NIS with no star.
Rating: Summary: Norton / F-Secure Review: The program is running excellent on my PC (512 Kb RAM). I downloaded the software from Internet and it worked after less than 5 minutes with firewall, automatic downloads etc. A good alternative to Norton Internet Security 2004 (which loves RAM) is to use F-Secure (or Norton Anti-Virus 2004) together with the excellent firewall of Zonelabs (even their free ware is fantastic). On my second PC i am using F-Secure/Zonealarm since this combination doesn't slow down the PC.
Rating: Summary: Dissatisfied Review: I purchased this product from the Symantic Store over the Internet. When it would not download properly, I found there was no way to contact the company except through unhelpful e-mails. They do not have an "800" number, they do not provide a mailing address. They never acknowledged my cancellation and failed to remove the charge from my credit card even though I ordered the upgraded 2004 CD version when the 2003 download would not work. I will never purchase anything from this company again. Quite frankly, I would give them a minus 5 if that were possible on your rating system. Next time, I'm buying McAfee.
Rating: Summary: Somebody at Symantec needs to do more work... Review: Tried to download this off the internet...it didn't stick. Bought the CD...crashed during installation. Based on what others have had experience with, I'm glad it didn't get installed, and I'm glad I got my money back. I've known folks that do get it installed, and everything slows down...some programs will be impossible to gain access to.This is stupid. Why can't these companies make a product that really works? The other anti-virus software is supposed to be just as bad. Bummer.
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