Norton 360 v2 … same as the old …

I received an e-mail that Norton 360 v2 was available since I had bought the first one last year and long ago stopped using it. So many had tauted how it uses less memory, etc. etc. etc. but I found it wasn’t the case (they just distributed across more process from what I could tell) and they removed any kind of usefulness that SystemWorks had in the past. I posted this sometime last year but a quick overview… They made defrag a click and run program with no customization for files, the backup tool requires you to have 360 installed to restore it, meaning if you want to use it to sync multiple PC files, you need to make sure that 360 is installed and they took away countless other customizable features.

So we come up to 2008 and there’s a new version. I figured it wouldn’t be much better but gave it a shot on a fresh system. I added a few essential apps to get back up and running and then installed 360 v2. This install lasted 2 weeks. The first issue I started seeing is a ccvhost.exe (recalling from memory) crash on almost every shutdown which was associated to 360. Not soon after this I started seeing applications not exit memory. I started to notice the system would start to slow way down after being up and running, slow start-ups and shutdowns (with the above error). I found that if I ran something like Word, exited normally it would stay in memory and using a nice size footprint depending on what I was doing. Same thing with Excel, Nero, PS, Flash and other higher memory demanding apps. Small apps like ccleaner exited fine. After seeing this and associating it to the shutdown error, I un-installed and re-installed 360 with their cleaning utility. I didn’t initially see any issues but low and behold it started again. I did find some information while looking for a Symantec cleaner that this apparently happened on the previous version as well and re-installing fixed it, which is the only reason it got a second chance. So I’m officially done with this product and probably any other home based Symantec apps. They made no improvements to allow customization and apparently have some major bugs.

Alternatives:

AVG works fine and I really don’t think the corporate edition of SAV is that bad even though it takes up a bit more memory and if your company can provide it to you. One of the things that somewhat tied me to it before was also having the Anti-Spam as a free add-on which I think is still a decent product (not sure if they updated it for the 2008 version since I didn’t install the add-on pack) but I found SpamFighter as a free replacement. I haven’t had a need for the whitelist/blacklist feature so I’m not that interested in buying it. I probably will at some point as support for the product but it works great without purchasing it. So if you’re looking for a good Anti-Spam and not interested in a $50/year (unneeded) Internet Suite, check out SpamFighter!

The Yearly Subscription Fee Scams:

I want to get a page up of free software soon that covers how you can save cash by using some basic tools that do a good job without dropping yearly subscriptions. I have no issues with buying software but this “yearly full priced subscription” scam these companies are running is worthless. Looking around, I could hardly find anything that was really a spam tool on it’s own. All of them are “Internet Suites” and charge a premium YEARLY for these additional unneeded apps to eat memory. My Windows firewall and a decent router covers me on about everything but AV and Spam. Hell, I’d have no problem with some of these products if I paid $50 for the package and chose to keep that version and paid $10/year for the definition updates. If it works, I could care less about a new version every year. All they’re really doing is repackaging essentially the same product with fixes, changes to the interface and shovel it out the door to consumers as a new version and charge a full price. Some of them aren’t even new versions, just a way to charge a premium yearly. I only hope that these free utilities can get enough steam to start making companies like Symantec rethink their strategy.