Norton Internet Security 2004

Manufacturer:	Symantec
Release date:	26 September, 2003

Norton Internet Security 2004

Average rating: Stars

Stick with the older NAVs

Both my wife and I purchased this software near the end of 2004. At first, many of the "features" were just an annoyance, and I assumed that I would gain experience with them and move on. That never happened.
While online one day, Internet Security mysteriously disabled itself. I immediately got off the internet, but was unable to reactivate the program. After trying everything I could think of, including unistalling and reinstalling the program, I contacted Symantec. They advised, via email, me to do all the things I had already done (by the way, their online automated help is abysmal). This had the predicted result of not solving the problem. A clean boot and registry edit later, the program was still not functioning. At this time, my Outlook had ceased functioning until I removed the program, and several other programs on my machine returned errors stating that they had encountered problems and "needed to close". Prior to Internet Security crashing on me, I had never seen this error before. I found it distressing that the program designed to prevent any kind of Internet attack was also giving me this error.
I did some searching online and found a couple articles that said that Internet Security had been found to have a bug that allowed hackers to disable it over the web. Symantec assured me that this was not true. In the end, I completely removed the program and that solved most of my woes, however I am still recieving the same strange "this program has encountered a problem and needs to close" error with Adobe Distiller, and occasionally with other programs, however, only the Adobe Distiller seems to be completely fatally affected.
My wife has had problems with her Internet Security, and has also found that disabling it is the way to go. Fortunately, her's did not die completely as mine did.
Bottom line is, from my viewpoint, beware of this program. I never had any problems with earlier NAV versions, and I will be returning to them, although I was rather soured on Symantec as a whole for having produced such a faulty program.

Norton Internet Security 2004 - Symantec

Effective, but VERY bulky

While it has a rather effective firewall, and comes with Norton Antivirus (which I'm actually rather fond of), the Security Suite has significantly slowed down my system. I'm currently using a Sony Vaio S-150 (which I bought at the end of this past August), and it takes about five minutes just to boot the system - in fact, I've taken to just hibernating, rather than shutting down completely.
The Antivirus is good, but "Internet Security" just isn't worth it.

Symantec - Norton Internet Security 2004

Voted With My Feet

After months of frustration with NIS 2004 and Symantec's pitiful tech. support, I finally threw in the towel. Went with PC-cillin Internet Security 2005 and am happy that I did so. The PC-cillin UI isn't as refined as NIS's but - you know! - the product works, the Anti-spam component integrates nicely with Outlook, and etc... No compatibility issues and my machine is running noticably quicker.

With any luck, I'll never have to be concerned with the quality of TrendMicro's tech. support. In any event, it couldn't possibly be worse than Symantec's. Here's Symantec's version of how to fix the Visual C++ Runtime Error for the AntiSpam plugin, so well documented in other customer reviews and on the Web:
1) Rename MSOUPLUG.DLL to MSOUPLUG.OLD. Trouble is, that's not a fix; it simply prevents the error message by disabling the very plug-in you were trying to fix.
2) Do a LiveUpdate for NIS 2005. Trouble is, I was running NIS 2004.
3) Remove and reinstall NIS 2004. A painful procedure that, in the end, doesn't work (and they know it).
4) Upgrade to NIS 2005. (Yeah! Right!)

Um... NIS 2004 a bad product. Very bad. Read the reviews here before you buy; we can't ALL be lying...