What’s Wrong with Norton and McAfee Virus Protection Software?

Don’t even con­sider buy­ing Nor­ton or McAfee secu­rity prod­ucts. They are expen­sive, com­mer­cial­ized, inef­fi­cient, and way more com­pli­cated than they should be. Out of the 1300+ ser­vice calls I have com­pleted in the last three years, major­ity of my virus and spy­ware cus­tomers had one thing in com­mon. They all had a Nor­ton or McAfee secu­rity prod­uct installed on their infected com­puter, and that trou­bles me.

Nor­ton and McAfee Are Expensive

Peo­ple spend their hard earned money on a pro­gram that does not ade­quately pro­tect them. One of the main objec­tives hack­ers and spy­ware pro­gram­mers focus on, is mak­ing sure their lat­est pro­gram can dis­able Nor­ton and McAfee secu­rity products.

This is one of the down­sides of being at the top. but unfor­tu­nately both Nor­ton and McAfee are slow to fix their soft­ware vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, and ulti­mately the cus­tomer suf­fers in lost time and money spent with tech­ni­cal sup­port, and finan­cial insti­tu­tions try­ing to clear up iden­tity theft.

One day you see the Nor­ton icon at the bot­tom of your screen, and the next reboot it has dis­ap­peared with­out a warn­ing, because a spy­ware pro­gram has silently dis­abled it. Why should you spend money on fake protection?

Pop­u­lar Solu­tions Aren’t Always the Best

I know most of you bought Nor­ton or McAfee because:

• it’s a pop­u­lar brand,
• the salesman/Geek Squad agent said it was a good program,
• or per­haps it came bun­dled with your computer.

Keep in mind that being pop­u­lar doesn’t mean you are the best. Syman­tec and McAfee prob­a­bly spend two or three times as much on mar­ket­ing than they spend on research and devel­op­ment. Which proves that spend­ing a lot of money can make a prod­uct successful.

Just because HP or Dell pre­loaded the soft­ware does not make it good, either. They merely receive a check every time you con­vert your trial Nor­ton and McAfee soft­ware into a sub­scrip­tion. It has been and will always be about money. These com­pa­nies need this kick­back because prof­its on sell­ing hard­ware alone is almost nonexistent.

Those Extra Fea­tures Rob Your Com­puter Performance

Nor­ton and McAfee prod­ucts are also extremely inef­fi­cient with hard­ware resources, and requires a lot more com­puter resources than they should. After I remove Nor­ton or McAfee from my client com­put­ers, most of them notice a sig­nif­i­cant boost in boot-up time, and over­all respo­sive­ness.

When I worked for South­west­ern Illi­nois Col­lege we had a vol­ume license with McAfee, and had installed it on all of the staff com­put­ers. Nearly all of the staff began receiv­ing blue screens of death, fre­quent crashes, and other crazy things.

For what­ever rea­son McAfee and Nor­ton believes they have to be intru­sive to your sys­tem to pro­tect it. They might change all of your fold­ers to “Read Only” to try stop­ping viruses, ran­domly block your Inter­net con­nec­tion with­out warn­ing, or inter­fere with your soft­ware installations.

Why are Nor­ton and McAfee Prod­ucts so Hard to Use?

Most of my clients do not know what they are look­ing at when the explore their Nor­ton or McAfee inter­face, which causes them to default to using the fea­tures that don’t require input, or the auto­mated features.

I hardly ever see a per­son use the Online backup fea­tures, the ID pro­tec­tion fea­ture, and other gim­micky add-ons. Most peo­ple don’t even notice Nor­ton has expired or deac­ti­vated itself when it does, or under­stand that when your sub­scrip­tion runs out, you are COMPLETELY vulnerable.

Well What Should I Use?

For the last three years, I have been rec­om­mend­ing AVG Anti-Virus & Anti-Spyware, and have never received reports of rein­fec­tion from my clients.

AVG is not a resource hog, it is very effec­tive against viruses and spy­ware, and it is “set it and for­get it” sim­ple. The updates are daily and auto­matic, and detected spy­ware and viruses are removed in one click instead of several.

I always say that being reac­tive is more expen­sive than being proac­tive. I would rather pay a few dol­lars now to keep my com­puter virus free, than pay a cou­ple hun­dred dol­lars for a tech­ni­cian visit, and then pay a few dol­lars to keep my com­puter virus free, on top of that.