Symantec Antivirus Corporate vs. Norton Anti-Virus

This question isn't for me since I will be running Kapersky anti-virus.

I have a friend who is running Symantec AntiVirus Corporate (in Windows XP)
at work and he was told that Norton Anti-Virus was a superior product.

Any thoughts on what are the differences between the two, and which one is
better? (i.e. as in more effective at finding viruses and keeping the system
safe, less CPU overhead, etc.).

Thanks

JC

 

#######################
Norton is made by Symantec, so I don't know how much of a difference
there is.

 

McAfee's corp. AV products are better than their retail products.

NAV may be retail and SAV may be corp. so their might be a difference.
I wouldn't know because I won't touch their AV products if you paid me to.

Dave




| On Sun, 03 Oct 2004 23:16:40 GMT, "Johnny Canuck"
|
| >This question isn't for me since I will be running Kapersky anti-virus.
| >
| >I have a friend who is running Symantec AntiVirus Corporate (in Windows XP)
| >at work and he was told that Norton Anti-Virus was a superior product.
| >
| >Any thoughts on what are the differences between the two, and which one is
| >better? (i.e. as in more effective at finding viruses and keeping the system
| >safe, less CPU overhead, etc.).
| >
| >Thanks
| >
| >JC
| >
| #######################
| Norton is made by Symantec, so I don't know how much of a difference
| there is.

 

I run Symantec Corp Edition products on all of our Home and Business
systems, and all of our clients run Symantec AV products. While using
Symantec products we've not experienced any compromises by viruses, not
had any installation or performance problems, and feel reasonably virus
secure.

I have also used Norton 2000~2004 products on other systems, and we
avoid the Suites (NIS, NPF, etc..), we only use Norton Anti-Virus. It's
been the same, reliable, easy, secure, not one system compromised.

We just did a cleaning of a Sorority at a local university, 40 machines,
from all different places, mostly Windows XP, about 6 Windows 98, 1 Win
ME, and 1 MAC. The systems were running mostly McAfee (about 25 of
them), about 10 were running Norton 2002 & 2004, and several were
running CA AV software.

There were three machines that were clean - they had Norton AV 2004 on
them, were updated, and had XP SP1 and auto-update turned on. The MAC
was clean, but it had not been patched for the latest OS/X flaws.

The machines with McAfee products were the most infected - anywhere from
100 to more than 400 viruses found (we removed McAfee and used Free AVG
on those machines). Several were so bad that we wiped them. In almost
every case the McAfee product was installed by the computer vendor (Dell
being the most common) and not setup to pull updates - not one person
knew that they had to register to get updates, and it's not clear that
they were unprotected).

We cleaned the systems, installed free AVG Personal or, if a valid
subscription was present, we updated and re-ran the scans (double
checking with AVG also). We installed XP-SP2, disabled File/Printer
sharing and all seems to be running well.

If they could have afforded it I would have install Symantec Corporate
Small Business Edition 8.1 on every one of them and set the server to
control updates and functions.

 

#######################

That is kinda the reason why I made this thread because I figured as much as
well...

 

Helpful info with some nice statistics for the MacAfee vs. Norton stuff
thanks.

Any idea on what is different between symantec anti virus and norton
anti-virus though?

Thanks

JC

 

I have always believed that Norton AV is a superior product. The
problem with Norton and the rest of Symantec's products is that they
cannot be readily removed. Consequently these products rank right up
there with AOL as dangerous for the home user. If Symantec could or
would take the time to clean out their astounding number of registry
entries they might regain my trust and the trust of others. As it
stands now, any vendor that cannot clean up after themselves is every
bit as undesireable for the home user as the average virus infection.
It's should be a simple issue which raises the question of why Symantec
is unwilling.

Q

 

I got hold of a copy (5 licence) of SAV Corp edition. Firstly it isn't
bloatware - ok it's not the 'slimest' of AV products, but no were near as
bloated as their retail products - my system hardly slows down at all (2ghz
P4).

The detection rate seems to be good (SAV has picked up stuff that AVG Pro 7
or Avast didn't find).

IMHO Norton/Symantec has always had a pretty good detection rate. I think a
lot of people are put off because their retail products are such resource
hogs and put lot's of files all over a system.

Clive

 

The Symantec product "Small Business Edition 8.1" seems to have a
smaller foot-print, runs faster, but does not have all the nice pretty
things that make home users feel warm and fuzzy. For instance, when
scanning outbound and inbound email with 2004 you see the icon working,
with SBE 8.1 I never see it scanning the email, at least I don't see it
doing it on the desktop.

I like SBE because it appears to be less overhead. I have no idea if
they use the same engine.

 

I remove it from several machines that were of different types, and we
removed the Norton product from hundreds of systems to replace it with
Symantec SBE Corporate Edition. Not a single removal problem on any of
the machines.

 

Nope. Replacing a Symantec product with another Symantec product
doesn't count, since most that I've worked with use the same registry
hooks; the same hooks that remain in place when removing the
applications; the same hooks that will cause pain and suffering when
installing another vendor's application.

Q

 

When we did the machines at the Sorority and some other non-profit
types, we removed expired NAV 2000, 2001, 2002 products to install AVG
Free version without any problem.

 

Nope. Replacing a Symantec product with another Symantec product

Well said, I couldn't agree more with you, and I can verify this from many
computer repairs where the owners have unsuccesfully tried to unistall a
Nortons product, then proceeded to dig deeper & deeper holes fot themselves
as they attempt to remove it manually.
The last machine I looked at had the Latest Corporate edition, with the
latest definitions, which did uninstall, and we installed Avast. After a
full scan Avast found 9 viruses that Nortons had let slip through.


Fred

 

I know that the Symantec AV products 'forget' to remove the Outlook hooks
upon de-install. After de-install, Outlook starts will errors that a
certain add-in can't be found.......

This behaviour was seen in the v7, 8 and 9 of Symantec AV corp. The problem
is easily resolved, but that's not the point, I think.

Currently I'm using McAfee Corp., and I'm very pleased with it.

Wimbo