I post my experiences with Norton 360 so the whole truth is available to average users.
I have 5 PCs (3 Windows 10 Home & 2 Windows 7) and 2 iPhones. I was using Kaspersky when the “geniuses” of the IT department of my company required me to have either Norton or McAfee (only 2 choices) in order to connect remotely and told me the Norton was the best choice. I had no other choice except to purchase Norton (which I have had before and considered it a resource hog). Norton was OK for a while. When Norton purchase Life Lock everything changed with new updates (Norton 360 is released). Norton “sold” me “security” protection for my iPhones, which turns out that the only “security” it provided was to alert me that a new iOS update was available. Many other AV makers don’t provide this lame “security”.
Pop up notifications would appear at different times no matter what you were doing on the PC. The notifications were about some security breach somewhere in the world and how the “ONLY” way to protect myself was to purchased Life Lock and to buy extra Cloud storage and back up all my files. Clearly this is an unasked for or unauthorized sales pitch directly to my PC. Norton does have a “setting” to stop notifications, but these “security” notifications (aka scare tactic to encourage a sales) are not affected by any setting the user can make. There is no way to stop or prevent these “security” notifications. My definition of malware is software that is designed to prevent the user from preventing the malware from running and is designed so the maker will make money from its usage. These “security” notifications definitely meets that definition. All attempts and emails to Norton to resolve this were a dead end. Norton support is very hard to actually contact no matter what their web site states. I am not the only one as their forum is filled with pages of numerous users complaining about this spamming practice of Norton and saying that they will not renew their subscription.
To make Norton 360 even worse, it added a new feature about checking for updates for all your other apps. This caused a lot of problems for a lot of users including myself. I had to install a backup image to correct the problems it caused and prevent it from causing the problems again when I booted up. All these changes to Norton to become Norton 360 vastly increased its resource needs to the point that some less robust PCs are totally unusable until Norton 360 finishes its checking and phone home actions.
I finally finish my subscription (Norton does NOT give refunds for renewal…or at least not to me). I removed Norton 360 using its Removal app (which is a removal or reinstall app). Even thou I clearly marked Removal Only as per Norton’s instruction, the app installs the reinstall installer into the Startup folder and tries to install on every boot up until you physically remove the installer from the Startup folder. This trying to reinstall when you mark Removal Only is the action of malware.
I replaced Norton 360 with eSet on the 3 Windows 10 PCs and Windows Defender on the Windows 7 PCs. Notification spamming is gone and resource hogging is gone (even the less robust laptop is usable after booting up).
This experience with Norton demonstrates what happens to a company when sales becomes more important than customer wants (called customer service)….great for short term gains but very bad for any long term gain.
HTH, Dana:))
