[Macworld]

Post your comments for Review: Norton AntiVirus 11 here

[Charles Owen]

i am hard pressed to remember ANY positive experiences with Norton products. My experience has found them to be highly intrusive, and very controlling. I really dislike a program that should be very much in the background constantly reminding me to do something to keep it happy. If I had a PC system crash, the first thing I would disable would be all the Norton products, and invariably that would solve the problem.
Other than that, they are great additions.

[ATX]

Wonder how NAV11 compares to VBX5?

[jarome]

This caused kernel traps on my MacPro. The disappeared after an uninstall. Stay away from this program!

[datajockeys]

This should be listed as "Paid Advertisement". Notron has been a non-product for some years. Don't get me wrong... I have made a lot of money from Norton. Fixing busted uninstalls, crashed systems, and customers fed up with loosing a perceived 1/3 of their speed. Scott, you just lost a lot of credibility with this puff piece. Closing shot: Do you really need AV on OSX?

[fireblue]

I work as an IT Manager with 2000 desktops and I wouldn't let Norton near any of them.
Norton is what made me move to Mac's as I'd had enough of it destroying my machines with its poor performance. It's also the program which keeps me busy with friends and relatives who haven't moved to Mac's yet.
I'll echo a comment made in the last AV debate - when companies like AGV release a program I'll trial it and subscribe if I ever feel the need.
As for Norton I would never buy one of their products again and I pass this on to whoever I deal with when it comes to AV.

[g3jedi]

I've been using Norton products on my Macs since 1998 and have never had a problem. Back in the days of Norton Utilities for Mac it helped me recover many accidentally deleted files. It saved my butt many times. And even back in the 90's when there were far fewer viruses for Macs NAV found a couple. I run a small video business and it requires that I accept files from customers. As a result I have found PC viruses on my Macs. NAV makes sure that I don't pass any of those on to other customers.

[bkemper]

By "800-pound gorilla", do you mean that it has always been slow, bloated, invasive, and dangerous to the continued health of my system? Because that it the case with every other Norton/Symantec product I've owned. Norton products have certainly caused me much more trouble than viruses ever did.

[lwdesign]

Back in the days of OS 7, 8 and 9, Norton Utilities for Mac were very helpful in keeping my systems up and running.
Then along came OS X and Symantec retired Norton Utilities, and decided what Mac users needed was an anti-virus tool only. I had so much trouble with NAV that I finally deleted it and did a clean system install. It caused so many problems and crashes that I avoid it now like relatives asking for money. I would never put NAV on my computer again unless Symantec put forth guarantees that they had cleaned up the amazingly buggy code it was built with. Nah, on second thought, I'll avoid it entirely.

[traildog]

Boy, am I with this thread! I'm a switcher: 20 years PC, 8 months Mac. I am the president of a busy mail order dot-com business, and depend on computers to keep everything running smoothly. I tired Norton twice in the past, both utterly disastrous experiences requiring long conversations with tech support personnel in India, uninstalls, and the rebuild of some of my data. Neither of these experiences were caused by a virus, but rather the invasive nature of NAV. Never again!
For years now AVG has been my choice product to protect my PC's and now virtual PC environment, and I too look forward to the day when they come out with a version for the Mac platform.

[Tom_Diola]

I hope (one can dream) that we won't ever need any antivirus for the Mac - I don't think Linux or AIX use it ...

And I hope the antivirus companies go out of business!

[bastion]

g3jedi said:

I've been using Norton products on my Macs since 1998 and have never had a problem. Back in the days of Norton Utilities for Mac it helped me recover many accidentally deleted files. It saved my butt many times. And even back in the 90's when there were far fewer viruses for Macs ...

Um. Far more, actually. There were dozens of bits of malware for pre-X Mac OS, including some that were actual viruses. Today we've got a handful of Trojan horses.

[bastion]

Macworld said:

The application ... also scans compressed files (.sit, .zip, and so on). NAV actually decompresses and then recompresses files on the fly, which makes such scans slightly more resource intensive.

I've been thinking about it and I can't come up with a single reason that (for simple testing) such a program should recompress the extracted data rather than just delete the temporary extracted copy and leave the original archive unmolested.

[Photonerd]

Norton products cause more problems on Macs then they solve. Just say no.