Norton 360 Upgrade Edition (3 User Licence) (PC)

I really wanted to like this. I've been using Norton Internet Security for over five years (upgrading each year) and been generally happy with it, so decided to try Norton 360 as the reviews seemed positive and the back-up facilities sounded great. However, having wasted around 15 hours over 10 days trying to get it to work properly, I've given up, got a refund and switched to another brand.

1 The software takes a long time to install. Anti-spam and parental controls are not included on the CD and have to be downloaded from the Norton site - installing everything on two (fast, big RAM, broadband) PCs took around an hour and a half (not including the time for the program to look for and install updates). This won't be a problem if...

2 ...the initial install appeared to be successful, but the next day error messages appeared saying that the software must be uninstalled and re-installed. This happened every day on one or other PC (normally both) despite the support from Symantec, meaning a wasted hour and a half at the start of every day. Shoppers of a certain age may remember spending eons waiting for software to load from a cassette recorder (ask yer dad) to early home computers like the Spectrum (whilst praying the dog didn't nudge the cable) and having to do this every time you wanted to use that particular bit of software. At one point I got quite nostalgic.

3 The support from Symantec is slow (around 48 hours to respond to an e-mail) or you have to pay premium rate phone charges for telephone support. I wasn't inclined to do this because a) the time spent uninstalling and reinstalling suggested that this might require a second mortgage and b) frankly, if I spend £50 per year on a product, I expect a degree of free help to get it running.

4 The first bit of support involved downloading and running the Symantec Removal Tool (see other comments on this page). As the tone of this sounded fairly critical, you'd imagine it might be part of the Install CD, or at least a recommendation to run it included in the instructions.

5 When this had no effect, subsequent support involved, er, removing components manually that the, er, Removal Tool hadn't. At this point, what little confidence I had left in the product began to drain away and faced with complex Selective Start-Ups (I know, it's not that tricky, but it's not far from "try a Selective Start-Up" to "re-install your operating system"), I thought I'd try another product (F-Secure), which I had up and running on both PCs in under 15 minutes.

Norton 360 may be brilliant, but I'd strongly suggest downloading the trialware version and (critically) checking it runs for a few days before you decide to buy. Even then, that may not be entirely indicative of any impending snags as part of the problem seems to be something to do with the activation / subscription process; I'm not sure if the trialware version would pick up on that.

I've been doing the backups for my two computers I use at home for almost 3 months now with Norton 360. I use an external hard drive to store the backupped data on but also the online storage feature. About two weeks ago I was able to restore my main computer after a hard disk crash without any problems. I was really glad to have bought this piece of software (and to have actually done the backups;)).

Don't install Norton 360 until your previous Norton version has expired. I installed 360 too soon and lost all the unexired days left on Norton Internet Security.

The product info does not state that 360 has Parental Control but this can be freely downloaded after installation of the software. Only been using it for a week but seems ok, time will tell.