Honest opinions for NIS 2007 and Norton 360

Can you state the speed/ram of the machine used for this speed evaluation?

For comparison: an administrator who manages small number of office PCs (15+ mainly Celerons in 1-2GHz range, 512MB) had to switch off NAV 2007 (sorry, not NIS 2007). He said that the slow down was becoming unbearable to users.

He's now running a separate for-pay anti-Virus and a separate free firewall software and is quite happy with the result.

On what type of speed/memory machine does NIS 2007 become bearable?

 

A local non-profit that I am doing work for has roughly 15 pc's using NIS2007. Some are 5 year old 1.5-2.4GHz P4's with 256MB of ram and NIS runs fine. I told them to pick up 25-user Symantec Corp from a non-profit software reseller for $85 over a year ago, yet they still managed to buy the wrong AV suite.

halcyon, IMO the sysadmin you're referring to should be looking in other areas to increase system performance (kill visual effects, msconfig, services, etc,). NAV07 is far from a memory hog.

 

I don't let an av constantly scan every file in the background on my workstation, productive computers although I think we are using Symantec on the gateway(now required by the insurance) along with SurfControl URL filtering and antidotes, but this may change as McAfee, Sophos and Kaspersky can be used with the appliance also. But I have used and tested alot of software so I'll give a personal view.

I think I'm right in saying nis lacks a view of network connections in real time as olders versions had. For awhile I though Norton was aligning more to the novice user but now I feel it is alittle of that and more ease of use. Nis is leaner and doesn't slow the machine down more than any other product, Symantec has really improved Norton with the release of '07 line.

Opinions, well Symantec is huge and they have alot of resources but that doesn't make the best product nor sometimes even a good one.

As for nis it has a good scoring av so okay for detection.
Firewall is very good, also has ids that scans the network traffic for over 800 os and program exploits. If an attack suits a signature nis will drop the packet and break off the connection although you may have to tune this to get a program/network talking. There is also an add-on pack with a very configurable ad blocker.
Usability, I think Norton is steered towards ease of use.

360 is a different animal.
Good detection as it also has nav.
Backs up data automatically online if you have a high speed connection or locally to usb/cd/dvd.
360 also has some System Works traits of cleaning out internet and tempory files.
As with nis, 360 is also very simple to use.

 

Classic tactic.

When system runs fine without Norton, but slow with Norton, it is the system's (or the admins) fault, not that of Norton.

Ah well

 

I guess all of the credible reviews, user feedback, and threads on this forum confirming that Norton AV/IS 07 isn't a resource hog isn't good enough? Considering the fact I have NIS 07 loaded on a lot of antiquated pc's with only 256MB is a testament to the resource-friendly nature of this years version. I've also compared AOL AVS & AntiVir classic on these same systems and the resource usage and system slowdowns are negligible between all 3 products. Honestly it sounds like your Sysadmin was just looking for a reason to not use Norton 07 products. To each his own I suppose.

 

My computer has PIII 500MHz CPU, 256MB SDRAM and i810 mommaboard. As you can clearly see its NOTHING compared to what you guys can flaunt over the forum. Still NAV2007 gave me no lags. Now installing ANY antivirus software will tax atleast something on the i/o but still I say I didn't notice any annoying delay apart from the few seconds of delay in boot time. That is perfectly understandable.

Of course my computer is tweaked for performance, not for showing off colors and all those fancy effects. All the useless services are stopped, autostart programs are strictly monitored.

Hence anyone who says their computer with gigs of RAM and gigs of CPU power has slowed down after installing NAV2007 has some problems with the computer. Otherwise the only explanation is Symantec specially designed NAV2007 to be friendly with my computer.