Gary: You must be lonely last night. You're so hilarious!
Of course you realize that I've forgotten more about computers in the last year than you've learned in your entire lifetime!!
Seriously, you have some good comments.
I have some personal stuff to take care of today with the wife, so I'll take a look at your HTG links later this weekend. Like to see what MikeH thinks of them to.
I could write a book about how wrong you are about Norton--and maybe I will, now that I'm retired.
One of my favorite stories was how I got fired from one of the companies I worked for years ago when I was a FNE (Field Network Engineer). This situation involved them removing the Norton from their corporate network. For many of the same reasons you mentioned their Executive Management and IT people told me. This was about 20 years ago or more. Are you sitting down, here comes the good part: About 5 years later, I was working for this company's largest competitor (call the company who fired me,
Company "A"),
Company "B". Now it turns out that I had happened to have installed Norton for
Company "B" while working for a different service outfit (I had forgotten all about them); and when we were in a sit down with their IT management and various Execs, the Norton issue came up. They had mentioned to me how glad they were that I had installed it, and insisted on it, not paying attention to the "crap" and haters of Norton out there. Then proceeded to then tell me about a year after I was fired from
Company "A", they contracted some devastating worm virus that devastated their network and all their computers. They were down for several weeks (like 5 or 6 weeks), until they could fix their problems and get up and back in business again. In the meantime, I was told, nearly all of
Company "A"'s customers called their big competitor
Company "B" and ordered their products from them. Essentially,
Company "A" was wiped out due to lost sales to their largest competitor, having had their computer network decimated by this virus that wasn't stopped by whatever brand of AV they were using (not Norton!), and
Company "B" was flourishing with Record Sales and
Company "A" went Bankrupt--never to be seen or heard from again!
So the moral of this story is that the Management of
Company "A" failed to install Norton after all my pleading, and someone told them I was full of it, fired me, and then got wiped out by a virus that slipped by their supposed better-than-Norton AV.
As if this wasn't interesting enough, this happened time and time again, especially in the early 90s.
Also, there are some Fortune1000 companies this also occurred to that I was involved with (yep, fired again for recommending Norton), and those companies went directly to penny-stock when they too got decimated by nasty viruses
. You will never convince me that Norton is crap! I've been using them since they started in 1990, and have been a dedicated fan every since. Of course, you are entitled to your opinion.
But, out in the Trenches of the business world, and even the Military, they swear by Norton.
Norton also does lots of development work with the top security agencies: FBI, NSA, DHS, and many of the other ABC agencies. Many of whom I worked with on securing their information assests. IT professionals vary on this as many of them have never had to secure the US networks and computers from foreign threats. I have, and this has been my experience. As I said previously, I still run Norton on most of my primary machines for my little repair business. I also install it, but not as much since competitive products and the Malware landscape has changed, as detailed by RichM and neemobeer. Many of the 2nd tier AV products have improved, so it's certainly worth testing the other products in "honeypot" environments which I still do, so products like Panda that were hot 10 years ago have been replaced by Avast & ESET, etc.
Well, there it is! Consider yourself educu-macated! Hah!
Talk to you soon...
BBJ