Antivirus/Client Side - 09 Sep 2003

I think this vote is one of those that accurately reflects the most popular product, but unfortunately not the best product (IMO). Norton will do a good job of catching viruses, sure, but there are several products that will do that. The problem is the other things Norton will do to your system--slow it down to a crawl on many machines, and consistently be a source of headaches during application installs. I can't count the number of times when I've had application install problems and called tech support to hear them say, "Do you have Norton Anti-Virus on your system?" I would pick Trend Micro or Sophos over Norton.

http://software-antivirus.com/ has a very interesting evaluation of the products. http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/columns/executive_tech/article.php/3316511 shows the turn-around time for Antivirus vendors. Symantec is one of the slowest to release updates! Symantec has average to poor performance...though it is highly regarded and very well publicized. (Symantec can barely install correctly, and cannot uninstall itself correctly). It scans slow, the update files are comparitively huge, they are slow to release updates, it misses 1 out of 4 viruses, their support is poor and slow, it uses a lot of RAM, it cannot even scan all the archive file types, and it conflicts with many other software programs. After using Symantec for years, I read reviews, did research and switched to Kaspersky Labs (http://kaspersky.com/). Immediately after installing Kaspersky Personal Pro antivirus, it found 2 viruses that had been on my computer for about 2 years...which Norton had always missed. I took the files to work and tried to use Symantec's Enterprise Gold Edition to scan the file and again, Symantec couldn't find the virus/worms. I called Symantec and spoke to them about it. It seems you must actually launch the virus before Symantec can see it, warn you about it, or do anything about it. Summary: Symantec is very popular and a big name...but their product is only average to poor. Hope that's a help to you.