My experience with Norton Antivirus/Firewall hasn't been good.
It crapped out on me several times when trying to reinstall or upgrade it on my own PC or on family/friends PCs. It would refuse to acknowledge that a previous version existed, not properly uninstall a previuos verions, or would throw up random error message about DLLs being mission when the PC booted up after a reinstallation.
I had even worse problems when trying to remove it so I could install a different antivirus. That just threw up even more random error messages. It seems to get it's claws into Windows and refuses to let go, even when trying to replace it with a newer version of itself!
I've heard similar problems from a few people I know who had it installed. I'm currently running NOD32 and I think it's awesome! Not only does it behave itself, it detects spyware and adware that Norton just ignored.
To hell with Norton and their crappy software!
edit: The fact that an antivirus software constantly updates itself isn't a reason to recommend it. ALL antivirus software upgrades itself. It wouldn't be much use if it couldn't download new definitions for new viruses.
KM.
Norton Antivirus has historically been very very good, but recent versions have me longing for the good ol' days. Norton's firewall (Internet Security) is very very slow, a bit clumsy, and far beyond most users' ability to cope with when it asks what to do with something. Problem is, in recent versions they are no longer separate products. If you install it and configure it to turn off the firewall so you just use antivirus, then at every login it pops up a message saying you have to fix some of your protection, and if you do, you've turned the firewall back on. It WILL NOT ACCEPT a configuration with modules disabled. And the adware detection they've added to their antivirus is also VERY slow: when it detects something, it wants to run an "examination," which may take 15 minutes, during which time your PC is crawling. This is on a 2.4, 2.8, or even 3.2 GHz machine.
As for upgardes, you are better off with a complete uninstall/reinstall. nothing from Symanetc has EVER been very good at upgrades.
In a recent test I saw which compared various AV and software firewalls to each other and to a "virgin" Windows XP system, the Norton Internet Security was the slowest to boot, by almost twice the time!
After all that, I can't make a different recommendation because I still use Symantec's product: their Corporate Edition is paid for by my employer and installed on my laptop and my home PC. That version is an incredible piece of software, but a different animal altogether from the home software they have.
As for spyware, I rely on Spybot, Ad-Aware, and I'm looking at AVG's new product, used to be Ewido. The latter seems awfully slo in my one testing.
