Norton Internet Security 2004 (AntiVirus, Firewall, AntiSpam, Privacy, Parental Control)

My PC (Intel / Windows XP) became unstable a while back; after connecting to the Internet I would get an “NT” badged-message that informed me that a remote procedure call had terminated unexpectedly and that the PC would have to re-start within 60s. I didn’t know it, but I had the blaster worm.

I don’t use my PC at home very much and I don’t have a broadband connection. As a result I’m very bad at downloading and applying the Windows Update patches. With my PC now crashing within 1 and 10 minutes of connecting to the Internet, now was not going to be a good time to try and download megabytes and megabytes of outstanding updates.

So I bought Norton Internet Security 2004. Pre-installation, the anti-virus package scanned my machine and discovered a virus and the Blaster worm. The virus it dealt with, the worm it failed to fix.

If I had read the manual at this point I’d have saved myself some trouble; Norton actually advise you not to charge ahead and install if you know you’re machine is infected as the more malicious viruses and worms attempt to mess with the installation of anti-virus software. I charged ahead.

The software installed OK (I was lucky), but it still couldn’t blast Blaster. Not only that but it now insisted on splashing a huge warning window across my screen that was impossible to clear. My disk was also churning like crazy at this point and something was using 90% of my CPU.

Between curses and at the fourth or fifth attempt I managed to follow a hyperlink from the warning message to the appropriate page on the Symantec (the software vendor that owns the Norton brand) website; this told me where to go to (a) get the Microsoft Blaster patch and (b) to get a Symantec clear-up patch. Both of these I (eventually) managed to download and install OK.

So – my PC is now clean and uninfected, why I am grumpy? Firstly because all Norton really did for me was to diagnose my problem; the anti-virus package couldn’t defeat the worm - it was the Microsoft patch which did that (the Symantec patch tidied-up a single registry entry) – and by tying-up most of my system resources and a third of my screen with that infernal, eternal warning message it actually made it harder for me to apply the Microsoft patch. If I had kept on top of the Windows Updates I wouldn’t have needed the software at all and could have saved myself the best part of £50. I dock the package one star for this.

Secondly, the branding is an utter con. After I had fixed that darn worm I used the auto update facility to get the latest virus signatures from the Symantec web-site and discovered that the signatures shipped with the “2004” edition that I had bought from PC World on the 3rd January 2004 were up-to-date as at… 31st August 2003. I had to download 21 MB of data over a dial-up line to get all the required updates. Whilst I accept that by its very nature a product like this will be obsolete the moment it ships, I also know a little bit about retail supply chains and I think that Symantec should be able to do much better than this. They should be supplying products like this on more of a just-in-time basis and they should be including an additional CD-ROM of the latest virus signatures for those of us that don’t have a broadband connection and for those people who are buying the product precisely because their machines are infected with a virus or worm that prevents them from connecting to the Internet properly. I dock the package a further star for this.

Lastly, I will mention that the Norton suite has not exactly improved the performance of my system… in particular, the silky smooth and swift boot-up that was always my favourite thing about XP is now a thing of the past. Having experienced the worst the Internet has to offer up-close-and-personal, however, I judge this a price worth paying.