Replies

Cybertooth wrote:

This latter interpretation gets a little support from the observation that none of my machines has received the new Norton; my wife did a few weeks ago (she has her own subscription) and she hates it.

Saimilar situation here.  I use two Win7 machines and two Win10, all with Norton 360.  I purposely (stupidly?) Live-Updated the Win7 machine that I use infrequently to the new version of Norton 360, to get a preview of it and learn what to be prepared for on the other machines and reduce tweaking time.  But none of the other machines have had the new 360 pushed to them.

On the machine where the new 360 was downloaded, after the required reboot I noticed that Win7 was very slow to boot.  And then, alarmingly, Windows said something along the lines of, “Windows is preparing your desktop.”  And when the desktop finally came up, sure enough it was nothing but a black screen with no icons except a recycle bin!  I rebooted again, and crossed my fingers that my actual desktop would reappear, and it did.  Then I tweaked settings for the new 360, and was mostly “all set” with this much diminished — but still apparently functional — version of Norton.

Then a few reboots later (weeks later), I was was again unexpectedly presented with a delay and that  message “Windows is preparing your desktop,” followed by the black desktop with only a recycle bin.  Again the reboot fixed it.  Even when I don’t have that particular problem, the new 360 seems to have slowed my boot time a lot.  And I won’t even get into all the ways the new 360 is a diminished product.  (I can’t prove that the desktop issue is 360-related, but given that its first-ever appearance was just after Live-Updating to the new 360 — v24 — I think it’s very likely.)

I have uninstalled Norton from one of my Win 10 machines, and Defender seems to be working fine.

When I try to use Community now I quickly end up with Access Denied messages that seem to be ip-based, because after that I immediately get the same message on any other pc on the network, unless I use a VPN to get a different ip.

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windbg, Cybertooth

steeviebops wrote:

As mentioned in the Reddit thread, it’s possible that someone was trying to reset your password. My guess about the different languages is probably what local Yahoo site they attempted the login from. I had one a few years ago with my Google account.

Thanks.  How frequently, if ever, was your Google account receiving Google account login codes that you didn’t request?  E.g.,  was that a one time series of emails like I have had (so far?), or did it become a regular/frequent occurrence?  If the latter, do you recall about how how long it persisted?  Not asking about the Indonesian spam in general, but specifically about unrequested account login codes (presumably Inodenesian as well).

Thanks for the reply, but that link does not appear to describe my situation at all.  The possibilities described in the Reddit link seem much more aligned with what I am experiencing, except that I don’t see variation in language mentioned there.  That issue is  the primary reason I posted here, although any comments are welcomed.

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TechTango

SueW wrote:

Unfortunately, as noted upstream, SO [KB5046705] also breaks Firefox 115.17.0 ESR.

But wouldn’t the fact that the SOs are non-cumulative allow avoiding the November bug, if no November update is applied and only SO are applied effective December?  Maybe I’m over-simplifying?

If this isn’t remedied with the December SMQR, looks like I’ll either end up switching to SO as of December; using 0Patch (which says they will support Win7 through at least Jan 2026); or just stop patching my Win7 machine.

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George1

PKCano and abbodi86, many thanks for once again coming up with workarounds to continue applying Win7 updates as of this month (11-2024).

Just want to double check one thing:  There is NOT a need need to switch to a new version of W7ESUI this month.  Right?

EDIT:  I probably should’ve posted this a bit further down.

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Guest

Drcard:)) wrote:

I’m sorry, but I don’t consider a statement saying the email you have sent has been checked and is virus free (which you could turn off) even close to intrusive as turning all notifications off and still have Norton pop up a box (in the middle of whatever you were doing) to let you know of some data breach had occurred somewhere and how you can protect yourself from such breaches by buying their LifeLock (BTW: you can do what LifeLock does for free with 3 phone calls to the 3 credit facilities to freeze your credit for new account until you unfreeze it). To me, intrusive means saying no or stop and the action continues. Adding a new feature that you can turn off is an option and not intrusive. Pop up notifications that you can not turn off or stop is intrusive.

Once reason I considered the NOD32 stamp annoying is that it covered so  much area instead of the simple “Checked for viruses by xx Anti-Virus” that other AVs were doing when stamping an email.  Sometimes the NOD32 statement took up more space than the rest of the email.  And turning off the option did *not* undo the lengthy stamp it had already put at the bottom of each email.  That should have been an opt-in, not an opt-out.

I’ve actually been pretty successful turning off most of the Norton notifications.  Now, I don’t know what’s going to happen when I get “upgraded” to v24, but I haven’t seen a single advertising  notification for at least a year.  I’ve seen a few “informational” alerts, but when I choose “don’t show me again,” it doesn’t.  The exception is immediately after a version update, when, upon first opening a browser, I get a full screen notice warning me that I don’t have all protection features enabled.  But after closing it, it doesn’t show up again until the next version update.

One thing about system-tray-area malware notifications in Norton that still annoys me is that, starting a year or two, they were made so large that they cover too much screen real estate.  Previously they had been small and discreet.  I actually considered switching AVs just because of that, but stuck with it.

I tried ESET NOD32 15 years ago, and they lost me forever when they went through my entire Outlook Inbox and added, at the bottom of every email,

” __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 3890 (20090226) __________

The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus.

http://www.eset.com ”

I didn’t even want email scanning!

That’s when I switched back to Norton, which had moved from intrusive and CPU-intensive to lightweight and quietly effective.  But even when they were intrusive (a stance they are moving back toward) they didn’t do anything as intrusive as stamping the bottom of each of my emails with three lines of mostly advertising.

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Bookman

Thanks for the heads up.  I’ve added an Internet Access block for CCleaner in Norton 360’s Firewall.  Now, will Norton honor that, especially after they update me to version 24?

This sounds like it could be a mess.  Three months ago I *knew* it might be a mistake to commit to Norton for yet another year.  It was clear what direction they were headed.  But I got a good price for a license key (in 14 years I’ve never once subscribed), and that firewall is great (unless they’ve changed that, too?).

Does cloud-only access mean you have no protection against a malware event when you’re offline?

“can’t get any back,” not “get get any back.”  Noticed too late to edit.

Ed Tittel wrote:

According to the archivists at the Library of Congress, who really care about such things, both NVMe and HDD media have a “lifespan” of 5-10 years so either or both should do the job for that limited time span.

Useful stat.  But…In my experience HDD failures are usually somewhat gradual, with warning signs and ability to recover much of the data, or sometimes even get the failing drive imaged for transfer to a new drive.  Aren’t NVMe failures typically of a “poof, all gone and get get any back” nature?  (I personally haven’t had an SSD fail yet, but I’ve only had a few, and only for a couple years.)

Thanks for the great information.

“USB-attached HDDs are great for archival use or backup when you don’t care how long it takes to complete such tasks.”

Actually, I *have* recently been thinking of switching from a USB HDD to SSD in USB enclosure precisely because I *do* care that image creation (about 230gb) seems to take so long, and I prefer not to use my machine while it’s imaging.  (Plus, maybe unnecessarily, I always set it to do the image verification).  Further, I have an unused single-sided 4TB Crucial P3 Plus NVME M2 stick available because — despite Crucial’s continued claims otherwise — it is definitely *not* compatible internally with my Lenovo Thinkpad P1 Gen5.

That said, I’ve heard some say that it’s *safest* to keep backups on HDDs.  Do you agree?

Also, getting back to the SDD enclosure, I’d been looking at the Acasis TBU405 USB4.  Regarding potential heat, as discussed above, do you think getting the version with a fan would help mitigate that?

Opinions please:

What kind of external drive is best to use to hold a system image (system drive is SSD) created with Macrium Reflect or a similar app?  Of particular interest is whether I should use an external drive containing an hdd, or one containing another SSD?  I’m more concerned with minimizing loss and maximizing “recoverability” than I am in imaging speed or cost (to a point…).  Should I worry about that fact that an SSD backup drive can also go “poof!” along with all the images it contains?

 

lmacri, thanks for the recommendations and all that useful detail.

At least thus far, I haven’t encountered a situation where Norton required a credit card — even temporarily — before allowing me to enter a new product key (possibly because I have Norton Security instead of 360?).  But that alone wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for me, since I could just delete the card (I could even use a burner card).  But the other issues you mentioned, plus the now-oversized and unmovable tray-area notifications, have done a lot to sour me on Norton.

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Bookman