My ritual purging of Norton.

I've finaly had enough of Norton after using its software for a few years its seemed to only get slower and clunkyer and just downright anoying, so i'm ditching it with the coming of my shiny new laptop.

Only thing is with having both Norton Internet Security and Systems works i've gotten used to using it so much i need to replace it all, and thats what i need help with.

Antivirus:
After reading about the net (mostly here), I fairly set on getting BitDefender as it looks to be the top runner and i really have no problem paying for AV.

Firewall:
Again after reading about, my router plus Windows firewall seems a nice idea as long as its going to give enough protection. Is it? Last time i had Windows firewall turned on was back when it was new out and back then it was a piece of crap that caused more problems than it solved, but now days alot of people seem to like and rely on it.

Defragger:
Sure windows has a defragger but having a 3rd person specialist program just seems good sense to me, and Nortons Scandisk is the only piece of their software that doesnt anoying me. But after yet more reading Diskeeper seems to be the one.

Backup:
Been using Norton Ghost to backup and it seems fine to backup with but i've never experienced loading from a backup, but what i'm really after is a backup program that doesnt save everything in those stupid image files but as actual files and folders mirroring my harddisk. Image files make no sense to me anymore, i understand their use way back when diskspace was at a premium but nowdays they just seem redundant, and theres noway to tell it they have truely backuped properly because their just a bunch of nonesense image files. Anyone know a good backup program that backs up files as files and is reliable to use?

Win/Disk Doctor:
Last on the list. These two i dont honestly need but they do come in handy to help things tickover nicely. I HATE reformating with a vengance so keeping my system running tickityboo and problem free is very important, but do i really need these? Any sugestions for replacements if i do? i'm at a loss on this one.

Any suggestions and advice welcome, i look forward to a day free of Norton.

 

My Norton subscriptions are running out, and for $50 for up to 3 PCs, plus a 3-month free trial, I'm really thinking of trying out MS' Live OneCare. I wish other vendors would get on the bandwagon and realize many people now have multiple PCs, and start offering 'home' licesnses that would cover all PCs in a household.

As for a 'backup', if you just want a copy of your existing data, and don't need point-in-time backups (i.e., "I need the copy of this Word file that I work on every day as it existed 3 weeks ago."), it's a simple enough process to write a batch file to copy whatever you want off to a second HD or your network to keep an up-to-date copy of your data. I wouldn't waste my money. Open a command prompt and type 'XCOPY /?'. Any command(s) you can type from the command line can be put in a txt file with a .bat extension and can be run whenever. Dropping a shortcut to the .bat file in startup or scheduling it with the Windows Scheduling Services will automate the running of it.

 

AntiVirus- AVG Free or NOD32 ($30)

Firewall- Personally I only have my router and my brain. But I used ZoneAlarm for about 5 years. there are a few other threads in this forum on firewalls that have better advice.

Defragger- O & O defrag. $44.95 Excellent software. 5 different defrag options and a very nice interface.

Backup- Ghost is still one of the best for mirroring a drive quickly. Throw it on a floppy and it's very quick way to back up an entire drive. Nowadays though, I just copy all my documents/music and other important files to a second hard drive and keep that on a shelf. Takes longer, yes. but simple and works. Haven't used backup software in a long time.

Disk Doctor- I'm not sure what you mean by this. i've never seen the point of a disk doctor type program. waste of money and resources. If you keep your drive defragged and run scandisk every once in a while you should be fine. There are free tools that will check your registry for bogus entries, but unless you have hundreds of thousands of orphans, you'll not notice a difference.

One thing you didn't mention is antispyware. Adaware, Spybot S&D, and if you want a realtime AS, the MS Defender is pretty good. All of these are free.