Should I renew Norton?

Twenty five days before my anti virus expires and Norton discontinues my updates. I haven't had an update in days and that has never happened.

I have been a loyal fan of Norton AV for the past 4 years, but after pettiness like this I'm tempted to drop my renewal and go with anther product. What say you?

 

Try some trial versions of other AVs like webroot, eset etc I stopped using Norton like 2 years ago

Sent from my Xperia Arc S using Tapatalk

 

I say drop them you can get MSE for free and it does A/V and malware scanning all in one with package. And get the Norton removal tool to get rid of that bloatware Norton. There are better free program and Norton isn't one of them anymore in the past it was but bloatware Norton is no longer a good program.

 

I sent them an email letting them know I will be leaving to go to Bitdefender.
It also highly rated and less expensive.

I appreciate your suggestion, though I prefer a paid anti virus since they are automated and typically better managed. I've read about MSE and the stellar job it does, but they typically take a lot more user interaction to keep them active.

 

try a manual update to see if that loads latest protection. if it does then something could have stopped it doing a routine update.
ive not used them for years and use avast pro now and in 3 years i think ive had 2 false positives which were updated about an hour later.
will be interesting to see how long it takes for them to reply. might even give you a few months extension

 

Are you kidding me? Why did you ever pay for that stuff in the first place?

 

Well for starters, 1) I haven't had any compromise in 4 years of the AV that it didn't take care of, and 2) I don't have to do anything to get that protection. Like it or not, it is a highly rated AV. In any event, after my stern email the updates are suddenly working again.

 

Not really pretty straight forward for me...your own saying could be the same for Norton vise versa as well. I set once and it does the rest no having to change the settings again. "take a lot of user interaction" doesn't count whether it is effective at what it does plus it is free Norton requires a paid subscription to even use it that in itself should one lapse you can get a infection. Bitdefender less expensive when MSE is free....one must like giving money out...?

Trust me your not the general computing users they always click on anything and pop and then ask how come I got infected doing that will render your A/V aka Norton useless as it was permitted to install and run. So the savvy one will avoid the pitfalls but the rest will click away and get the smack down.....

 

How exactly is paid a/v software better automated and managed compared to free software such as MSE?
In all the years I've used MSE, I didn't have any issues.
MSE is pretty automated as is. The only thing you might have to do at the beginning is set it to automatically update itself every day at a specific hour and at the same time do a quick scan (because otherwise, the time interval is set to a longer duration).

At any rate, as it was already explained, generally no a/v will probably keep you safe if you click on anything and everything online.
To that end, for those who are using common sense in the first place, MSE is more than enough (and maybe MBAM free which can be run on demand just in case).

 

I didn't use any AV protection of any kind for something like 10 years on a number of computers, including our family computer that was used by my wife and kids at the time, and never had any security breach of any sort, so your statistics above mean nothing. Of course, I did have those machines properly secured, and all users ran as Standard Users, with no admin privileges.

I did install Microsoft Security Essentials maybe four years ago on our family computer, and now also run it on my own laptops since I found it to have no impact on system performance. Never any security breach, either, although there were a few detections on my kids' computers. MSE is highly rated, too, with the big difference that it's free.

In simple words, the suggestion to pay for an AV product is nothing but a scam for the gullible. Their payment buys those that need it some peace of mind, I guess, but there is no real-world value in that proposition.

 

There are all sorts of free anti-virus and malware scanners/detectors (not removers) available, and have been in the past.
If there is no definition to stop a virus from loading onto the machine, then essentially you're buying a virus remover.

Operating in a Standard account for regular normal activities instead of an Administrator account is one of the simplest things that can be done to prevent widespread infection into the OS; sort of like a sandbox. Having a so-called heavy-duty virus protection while operating in an Administrator account is like relying on an umbrella to stop a falling brick.


EDIT: MSE does a great job of updating definitions for blocking older and newer viruses, and removing viruses - for FREE.
For me, I've caught 3 ad type - temporary internet files over 10 years. Cleaning my browser cache had the same effect as using the software to rid them.

EDIT2: Added some more opining onto the original paragraphs.

 

Let's just say that I knew these machines like I know the inside of my jeans pockets. Having an absolutely protected admin account (that was never used for anything but administrative work, and no general web-browsing, ever) helps a lot, too. Same with judicious selection of software that gets installed. Plus, every now and then, when fancy struck me, I did run some external scanners, rootkit detectors, and such.

Running all day-to-day work as a Standard User is where it starts. Next, for the way I use my computers, I could harden them further by restricting access to Startup folders and registry locations so it was near-impossible to inject code in the startup or login sequence of users. There are some vectors left on Windows systems that cannot be secured in this way without significantly impacting functionality, but I'm aware of those, and can check them if need be. Mind you, I am not naïve enough to claim that my machines' defenses were un-breachable, but they were certainly good enough to prevent the vast majority of malware (which really targets the low-hanging fruits, like those clowns that feel they need to disable UAP, or install every little piece of crapware they can find without ever checking what it is) from doing any damage. At that point, unless you really seek out all of those shady corners of the internet, the probability of getting infected is simply very low.

P.S.: Just for the fun of it I used to try and find known malicious websites and see if they could get through. I did see some interesting attempts, but all the ones I observed eventually crashed and burned, and did not manage to do any damage. I would say that in 99% of all cases not having admin privileges is enough for those simple pieces of malware to fail. Like I said, that's no guarantee for anything, but it speaks to the possibility of securing your system quite reliably without any AV protection. At the end of the day, that kind of thing does become time consuming (not to speak of the fact that the average user does not have the knowledge that is required to do what I did), so I found it easier to limit my involvement, and instead partially rely on a basic AV solution. MSE is quite adequate for this purpose.

 

Hello,

Sorry to hear that! I am Vineeth and I am from the Norton Support team.

Norton products receive the latest virus definitions only when the subscription is active. Sorry to hear that you have decided to move on. If there is anything I can help you with, please let me know.

I'm happy to help you!

Thanks!

Vineeth
Norton Support