| EC8010 |
I wasted six hours yesterday fighting Norton. NIS came up for renewal, and as it periodically loaded complaining that "ordinal 21 not found" and generated a 20MB .dmp file every time it was booted, I thought I'd install NIS 2006. I duly handed over the (price-fixed) £49.99 and attempted to install. It asked for the product code, started chundering away, told me to delete Spybot (which I did) then after about ten minutes or so said "installation failed" and gave me a link to go to along with "error 9999.171". The link detailed how to enable event logging. I followed the instructions, but it still didn't work (event logging was already on). The next step up was an auto-fix that required using IE6 to download some programs that would delete all Symantec products. I enabled IE6 and tried it. It didn't help. The final solution suggested was a manual download of the uninstall files. I tried that, and they seemed to work better. I also deleted Ewido just in case that was the problem. All the time, it was clearly storing the Norton product code because it never asked for it again. Each time, it did a preliminary scan and when I opened the report it said that it was "unable to ensure access to":
MACHINE\Software\Symantec\Norton Antivirus
MACHINE\Software\Symantec\Installed Apps
MACHINE\Software\Symantec\Common Client
MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Toolbar
Of course, from the moment I deleted all Norton products and used their online "help", my computer was exposed to attack. I pulled the plug on my Internet connection whenever possible to minimise the risk, but it was still unnerving.
I tried telephoning Norton to talk to a real person as well. Their UK "customer care centre" starts out with a very long recorded message (running up your telephone bill), and when it has bored you to tears with that, it redirects you to a call centre in India staffed by people who are terribly polite but no use whatsoever. They just read from a script like automatons. Not their personal fault, I doubt if a UK call centre speaking in Urdu would do any better. It's Symantec's fault for trying to save money.
Eventually, I gave up and re-installed NIS 2004. It took a lot of updates and false starts, but eventually it worked.
I mentioned my woes to a friend who does IT for a living, and he said that he'd heard bad reports of NIS2006. I contacted another friend, and he said he'd had exactly the same problem that I had.
Moral: Don't buy NIS2006. |
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| richie00boy |
Moral: don't pay for internet security full stop
avast! Home Edition
Zonealarm Free
Firefox browser
Thunderbird email and newsreader
Works for me :) Last time I used a Norton product, my machine appeared to have been attending the Anne Diamond school of bloatedness.
And while were on the subject of bloatedness, ditch Adobe PDF Reader and put on Foxit Reader and you will never go back |
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| Wynand |
My boss said that he used norton anti-virus, and that he'll never use it again because it wasted a lot of recources.
I personally use AVG-free and spy-bot 1.4 for my home pc. No problems so far. |
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| Geek |
There's also Bit Dfender and F-protect for freebies.
Another problem with mainstream AV is every worm/virus/trojan is written specifically to defeat them. |
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| Christer |
The only antivirur program I have used that didn't work well and that couldn't download updates was the only one I had paid for. Since then I only use freeware ones. Previously Antivir, now Avast.
As for firewalls, I previously used Zone Alarm, but is now trying Jetico. It was found the safest in test. The problem is that it is so safe that you can hardly do anything without getting a lot of questions, and for everything it asks, it will ask once again when you have rebooted. Not sure I will have enough patience with it, even if it is secire. |
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| EC8010 |
Wow! What a fast response!
| quote: | Originally posted by Wynand
My boss said that he used Norton anti-virus, and that he'll never use it again because it wasted a lot of recources. |
At the point when I had deleted Norton, I happened to glance at the task manager and memory usage. With Norton installed, memory usage usually trundles along at the 250Mb level. With Norton removed, it dropped to 120Mb.
I suspect Geek has nailed it for me:
| quote: | | Another problem with mainstream AV is every worm/virus/trojan is written specifically to defeat them. |
Now, if Norton had made their product just a tiny bit better, they could have continued to charge me for protection. I think they've just lost it. |
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| ssmith |
| quote: | Originally posted by richie00boy
Moral: don't pay for internet security full stop
avast! Home Edition
Zonealarm Free
Firefox browser
Thunderbird email and newsreader
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Excellent advice. I also once used Norton. It's a system resource hog.
I've been using Avast! for the past 2 years or so. It is FANTASTIC. I cannot fault it at all.
I compliment that with Spybot S&D, ZoneAlarm, Spyware Blaster, and Adaware SE. Like Avast, all are FREE (for personal use at least).
In the office I have Norton corporate edition. Less of a resource hog, but I get infected alot.
| quote: | Originally posted by Christer
As for firewalls, I previously used Zone Alarm, but is now trying Jetico. It was found the safest in test. The problem is that it is so safe that you can hardly do anything without getting a lot of questions, and for everything it asks, it will ask once again when you have rebooted. Not sure I will have enough patience with it, even if it is secire. |
Thanks for the tip. I will try that one, even though I'm generally satisfied with Zone Alarm. |
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| Christer |
| quote: | Originally posted by ssmith
Thanks for the tip. I will try that one, even though I'm generally satisfied with Zone Alarm. |
OR maybe you shouldn't, at least not without reading this thread
http://www.wilderssecurity.com/show...ghlight=svchost
so you get some help getting started.
I tried Jetico twice, and gave up within one or two hours. Then I found that thread and started to understand a bit more. I decided to give it a third and final try, and after a lot of experimenting I started to grasp it well enough to use it. However, it still drives me mad sometimes, since it is much more cautious than any other firewall, and ask a lot more about what to let through or not. Don't be surprised if it doesn't let you run an ordinary windows application without asking for permission. Some programs use ports even though they don't access the internet.
On the other hand? I tried kerio sunbelt that many people like a lot, but ther I got asked whether to let traffic through without always being told what program or process was asking for permission. How secure is that? |
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| bulgin |
Hi EC8010
I am still angry/upset/unnerved at my own troubles with this stuff. It is still on my computer and I still have around 160 days left on the current version. If you can imagine a vinyl record stuck in a groove for a couple of hours - that's how many red warning panes (which freaks me every time I see them!) I had these last few months. I know all about their Indian call centre and also went the costly person-to person route, without success. All very polite 'n all that but it didn't help me in the least.
Eventually, I managed to exchanged mails with a sweet lady somewhere in the cyber void who suggested to uninstall the stuff and re-load. Again at the cost of dial-up time. I shouldn't write this (touch wood), but this is my first week after 7 months without troubles.
While perhaps on a related subject, the ast few days (since Monday this week), I bought a Proline X series UPS which comes with easy to install software which gives you an impressive pane with meters and ac quality indicators, temperature hz readings and whatnot.
I charged the thing overnight and while this was being done, read the simple handbook and installed the software without incident. Yesterday morning, I carefully first switched the mains off, and installed the UPS.
Everything looked normal and I was rather impressed with my 'powerstation' pane.
Later yesterday, I wanted to use the computer again and this time, a white pane covered the entire screen - UPS disconnected.
I checked all plugins and asked the supplier for assistance, who was quite useless. Late yesterday, I called another branch of the suppliers who informed me that the problem was known to them and incurable and the remedy was to exchange the equipment. This was done late yesterday. I again put the replacement UPS on charge and decided to uninstall the old software. NOTHING AT ALL WORKED, whatever I tried to uninstall, and the white 'disconnected pane' was still there. I tried the replacement disc and got an 'ACCESS DENIED' notice.
I sent at 4am this morning an email, explaining the situation and asked the supplier to call me urgently. I also posted the details on their 'feedback' site.
I called them this morning but they were completely unaware of my mail or the problem.
In the end, it took a person to person confrontation with my computer in their store before they stirred themselves to fix things.
It is now about 1 hour connected to their UPS and all seems OK.
What is it with people like this who ignore customers' problems?
The name of the smartlooking outfit BTW is Chaos Computers...
This alone should have been enough warning.
Cheers all
bulgin |
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| Christer |
| "computer" and "support" are two words that cannot be used in the same sentence without lying. ;) |
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| EC8010 |
Good grief, I didn't expect to unleash this amount of vitriol!
To give them their due, Comet refunded the money to my credit card without any major quibble. Having seen how much of my resources are squandered by Norton, I'll be uninstalling it tout de suite and installing some freeware instead.
As for the Unusable Power Supply, let's hope John Hope http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/show...&threadid=57959 doesn't ever meet one. |
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| bulgin |
Guy, Guys
John Hope made my day. John Hope is now included in my private little toast late each night, when I drink a glass of good port, toasting the previous owners of my vinyl, for looking after the stuff and allowing me to play them and enjoy them again.
As for the suppliers of duff equipment, may they have interesting times...
@EC8010 Nice to hear from you! A long time ago, I had AVG stuff which worked well. For some reason or other, my computer technician uninstalled that and replaced it with NIS. Come to think about it, he probably needed a turnover boost.
Cheers
bulgin |
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| Bas Horneman |
| I gave up on Norton loooong ago...in the DOS era it was good stuff...always did more harm than good in the Windows era. |
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| 4fun |
Seems to me that every thing Symantec get their hands on turns into disaster.
Take for example Norton Ghost and Veritas Backup Exec they are not any longer what they used to be. |
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| phn |
Norton Antivirus is still the only antivirus program worth the name. People have always complained about it consuming computer power. But the other antivirus programs consume no computer power because they do nothing at all.
I stopped using Ghost years ago and have never used the other Symantec products.
Having that said, I run my desktop and laptop without antivirus programs. I let the licences laps. I do use ZoneAlarm, a program I couldn't be without. How else would I know what goes on inside the PC? And I have free versions of Ad-Aware and Spybot (mostly because they are free), though I rarely use them. Nowadays I never visit sites that can do any harm. No file sharing, no nothing. |
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| Christer |
| quote: | Originally posted by phn
Norton Antivirus is still the only antivirus program worth the name. People have always complained about it consuming computer power. But the other antivirus programs consume no computer power because they do nothing at all.
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Which antivirus progam is best changes from test to test and from week to week. Last time I checked a test, Kaspersky and Antivir were in the top in number of detected viruses, but that was a while ago.
For those of you who want to check if your firewall at least passes minimum security requirements, this is the place to check it:
http://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?rh1dkyd2
Any decent firewall should run in stealth mode, so a foreign computer can't even know if there is a computer at the IP address it is trying to contact. |
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| Christer |
| quote: | Originally posted by 4fun
Seems to me that every thing Symantec get their hands on turns into disaster.
Take for example Norton Ghost and Veritas Backup Exec they are not any longer what they used to be. |
There was a rather good competing program from Powerquest, that did basically the same thing as Ghost. Symantec bought them, and the Powerquest program is no more. As far as I am told, also Ghost no longer does what these two programs were useful for, making a perfect image of a partition. :( |
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| 4fun |
| quote: | Originally posted by Christer
There was a rather good competing program from Powerquest, that did basically the same thing as Ghost. Symantec bought them, and the Powerquest program is no more. As far as I am told, also Ghost no longer does what these two programs were useful for, making a perfect image of a partition. :( |
So true!
Today Acronis has quite good reputation as partition restorer and more i hope they not get swallowed by Symantec to. |
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| dr.strangelove3 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Christer
There was a rather good competing program from Powerquest, that did basically the same thing as Ghost. Symantec bought them, and the Powerquest program is no more. As far as I am told, also Ghost no longer does what these two programs were useful for, making a perfect image of a partition. :( |
Drive Image that was. Great program under win98.
On winXP machines it worked very, very slowly and you had to repair windows afterwards. On a XP machine ALLWAYS run the program from a repair diskette and not the dos mode. The program then wants to reboot in DOS mode, but somehow it locks up. Everytime I restarted it tried start Drive Image. After trying several things I was fed up with it and formatted c and reinstalled everything.
I till use Powerquest Partition Magic alot. Works great on an XP machine. |
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| EC8010 |
| quote: | Originally posted by Christer
For those of you who want to check if your firewall at least passes minimum security requirements, this is the place to check it:
http://www.grc.com/x/ne.dll?rh1dkyd2 |
Yes, very nice. Now which is the bit we're interested in? |
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| Cloth Ears |
Used to run AntiVirus Professional + Firewall (2003 edition? I think). Had no problems (and when bored, it was fun to trace the intrusions back to the source computer where they were initiated from). Don't have that PC any more, but I believe it's still working fine (friend still has it working).
Don't know anything about the current version, but it might be laziness (akin to Microsoft) causing the bloat.
VX Heavens indicates the sentiment expressed before (that the mainstream AV is what the majority of virii/trojans/worms are written to defeat) is absolutely correct. Most of them keep the latest copies on-hand to test against... |
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| Christer |
| quote: | Originally posted by EC8010
Yes, very nice. Now which is the bit we're interested in? |
I am really no expert in this, but if I gave the right link you will first get to a page where you get info about what can be disclosed about you from your IP number. There should ideally be nothing there than can identy you or your computer, although it will usually tell something about what ISP (Internet service provider) you have.
Then if you click "Proceed" you get to the "Shields up" page, for testing the firewall and some other things.
The two tests that seems most interesting are
All service ports which scans the firs 1056 ports on you computer and tries to make contact through them. There are three possible outcomes. If a port is open, then probably anybody can contact your computer through it. In the worst case, there is a trojan listening for incoming calls. If a port is closed, it denies access, but the caller still gets a response that it is denied access. A hacker will then know that at least there is something at this IP address and might try to attack you. If a port is in stealth mode, your computer does not respond at all to incoming calls. If all ports are in stealth mode, it is impossible to know if there even is a computer at this IP address. A decent firewall should use stealth mode for all ports that are not authorized to respond to this particular caller, that is, all ports should be reported as in stealth mode.
Browser headers shows what info your browser sends to the places you browse. It should preferrably not reveal any personal info about you or your computer.
You may also try the Messenger Spam function, to see if foreign computers can send pop up messages to you. There is a freeware program, Shoot the messenger, on tha same site that prevents that.
There are some more functions. "File sharing" tries to see if there is a file server that can be accessed. I think it is trying to find a server for local networks, but I am not sure. Somwhere on the site there is also a program where you can "bake your own cookies" :), ie. you can set cookies and tell yourself what content they should have. It is useful if you want to experiment with the cookie security settings in your browser. |
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| Christer |
| quote: | Originally posted by dr.strangelove3
Drive Image that was. Great program under win98.
On winXP machines it worked very, very slowly and you had to repair windows afterwards. On a XP machine ALLWAYS run the program from a repair diskette and not the dos mode. The program then wants to reboot in DOS mode, but somehow it locks up. Everytime I restarted it tried start Drive Image. After trying several things I was fed up with it and formatted c and reinstalled everything.
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Right, that's it. I still have the program, but haven't tried it since I finally decided to move on to XP. Sound like I shouldn't try it either. |
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| EC8010 |
| Christer, thanks for that. I will go away and experiment (carefully). |
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| richie00boy |
| quote: | Originally posted by Christer
Right, that's it. I still have the program, but haven't tried it since I finally decided to move on to XP. Sound like I shouldn't try it either. |
Drive Image 2002(?) works perfectly on my XP SP2 machine. I only ever use the boot floppys though. |
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| ssmith |
| quote: | Originally posted by phn
Norton Antivirus is still the only antivirus program worth the name. People have always complained about it consuming computer power. But the other antivirus programs consume no computer power because they do nothing at all. |
I disagree. I've been using Avast! Anti-Virus (Free) in combination with Spybot S&D, Spyware Blaster, ZoneAlarm & Adaware SE for close to two years now on 3 PC's I have at home, connected 24/7 to Internet. All of them have worked fine, and I see no reason to pay for Norton. |
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| richie00boy |
avast! has successfully blocked trojans coming on dodgy downloads and through scripted webpages, and removed viruses that AVG has not been able to (the boot time scan mode/option is very good).
It also seems to have a measure of anti-spyware as I run no anti-spyware software, yet on the occasions that I download the current top 3 packages I never have any. |
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