Reviews for Symantec Norton 360

360 Swirl Down

Strengths: It must do something because everything slows down.

Weakness: See above.

I usually expect Norton's products to get better as you add the updates. You know, rush to market, etc. But so far this is a lumbering dinosaur. If you are a deep thinker, this is perfect. Expect plenty of think time between downloads.

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Does what it should.

Strengths: Very user friendly. Have not experienced any adverse effects on PC performance - it does slow down a bit when running LiveUpdate, but that is it.

Weakness: After installing it on a Vista based PC, had to reinstall it twice. Was it Vista

Had it on an XP PC before the latter died (5 yo, heavily used laptop) - worked great, did not slow down PC (Unlike McAfee total protection which I uninstalled after a months use). After switching to Vista, had to reinstall it twice in the first month - whether due to Vista, or Norton, I have no clue. However, ever since (4 months) it has been running smoothly.

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Norton 360 is much improved over recent Norton AV...

Strengths: Broad malware coverage with minimal user interaction.

Weakness: Not able to change default settings for some important features (e.g. excluding files/folders from scan).

Easy to install and economical for 2-3 PCs. Good PC tuning included. Somewhat difficult to navigate and find settings for changing defaults. Less obtrusive than previous products for most malware protection.

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Very Satisfied

Strengths: Easy to install and maintain

Weakness: Haven't found any

I have installed this product on six computers, Vista and Windows 7 without a problem. Have tested a variety of anti-virus software, including other Norton Products. This is great for the members of the family or coworkers who do not need to see constant annoying "update" and "I caught something" messages. It does what it is designed to do well.

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Not Good

Strengths: Unable to determine

Weakness: 1. Support, 2. Program settings and control

Very very poor support. Will not work through proxy server. Well at least not my proxy. Symantec solution is to keep reinstalling until you give up and throw the disk away. Or run Live updates manually, which defeats the purpose of purchasing a product like this. Will also slow down most 1.2g and above machines. Put it on a 1.2g or less, and you may as well make it a brick. Stay away from this one. I am very versed in networking and computer systems. And have spent> 8 hours trying to fix the product. But it is so un-professionally written, there is practically no administrative control.

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Norton 360 - nice idea but doesn't deliver

Like others before me have said, this product looks good but is not as "automatic" as it's protrayed. So far, I have not had any of their "automated" scans happen without human intervention. Even their automatic backup isn't automatic. When I called support (on two tech support tickets) they put me through the usual steps. After about 5 emails when none of their suggestions worked, they started over with the first suggestion again. I gave up. I have decided that since the product "seems" to be working other than the automatic services which I do now manually everyday, I will wait until the subscription runs out and find something better - with support that is real and not a prefabricated response.

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Nothing but problems !!!

Strengths: 24/7 tech support

Weakness: Norton policy of paid support for manual virus removal.

Nothing but problems !! My computer recently was infected by Trojan Vundo and Norton 360 could not remove it automatically. When I contacted Norton they told me that I would have to pay $ 99.95 for them to help me manually remove the virus and this was only good for 60 days I think, After 60 days I would have to pay again. Well, I did find another virus protection company that would help me remove the virus manually if their software did not remove it. When I contacted Norton and told them that I needed to completely remove their program in preparation for the new programs installation they told me to run their removal tool on their web page and said it would completely remove their program. Wrong !! Again I had to call Norton and finally got through to someone that helped me remove their program manually. Come on Norton, I spent hundreds of dollars on your software subscriptions only to be treated this way.

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Horrible protection & support.

Strengths: The program disc makes a fine coaster for your beverages or Frisbee for your children.

Weakness: All support comes from an Indian office with BAD English skills. They LIE on the rebates, not fulfilling them! CAN'T contact TECH SUPPORT with issues.

advertised 360 with $40 rebates. I mailed them Certified Mail (they signed for it & it proved they got it). Yet after re-mailing 3 times, faxing 2 times I was told, "yes we got it, but the rebate is expired now, so sorry. Thank you for purchasing Norton!" To make matters worse, Norton does NOT operate well with ANY other security programs (spy/adware seekers). My computer then got infected with tons of ad/spyware, phishing and a virus. Tech support could NOT be reached. Whoever rated this a good program should be sent to the Middle East as a woman!

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Steer Clear - This Will Wreck Your Computer!

Strengths: none

Weakness: resource hog will make small problems into large ones bad technical support disables network adapters

Since I make my living off of my computer as a writer, I thought I would upgrade my protection and as I've been a fan of other Norton Products (now Symantec) I thought 360 sounded like a great deal.

I have a computer with an 80 gig hard drive, 512ram and 1.5 GhZ. Not a hoss daddy computer but a decent one none the less and it was working just fine prior to the installation.

I downloaded the software off the net and that was the last time my computer was able to connect to the Internet. I finally called Symantec support and was instructed to remove the 360 program and then reinstall it. I did so and it was worse - the system just went into initialization mode and then rebooted again and again. The Symantec support tech said I had a problem unrelated to the software and I needed to contact Dell and my ISP. So I contacted Dell and the technician said that he had handled other calls similar to mine and he showed me where the 360 software had disabled the network adapters and couldn't connect to the Internet and therefore was attempting to connect over and over.
I contacted my ISP and upon saying I had just installed Norton 360, was taken to my network adapters page where he confirmed Norton had disabled each and every one.

Another call to Symantec proved fruitless, I was instructed to remove the 360 one more time (which we managed to do by restoring the computer to a previous date and it didn't really work but it enabled us to un-install the program) and the technician told me since I had un-installed the program my technical issues weren't going to be handled by Symantec, thank you and have a nice day.

So I contacted the VP of Investor Relations and she referred me to a guy in the Executive Consumer Relations Team who described installing Norton 360 as "like putting a nuclear submarine in a lake". He also told me if I had an existing small issue in my computer this could have aggrivated it and caused it to escalate.

It is my humble opinion that this program is garbage and was released on an unsuspecting public without much testing. I Googled Norton 360 and came up with numerous complaints very similar to my own. Please don't spend your money on this ill-designed software or you'll be buying a new computer like I am.

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Don't Waste Your Time or Your Money

Strengths: Pretty Box

Weakness: It Doesn't Work

I've been using Norton 360 for over a year for two features, anti-virus protection, and an online back up service. Both of these failed.

My wife's laptop with Norton 360 installed and up to date virus definitions got infected with a virus in December. The virus took over Norton and disabled it. I reinstalled Norton, updated the virus definitions, and tried to root out the virus. Norton didn't help. I checked their online support and indeed they couldn't provide a fix.

At this point I reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows and all applications, including Norton 360. I began receiving Windows fatal errors, which pointed to Norton. Their online support claimed it was a memory problem.

I replaced the memory, and for good measure replaced the hard drive. Another new install. Everything worked fine until I installed Norton 360. I was then receiving continual fatal errors. I uninstalled Norton, switched to McAfee, and everything works fine.

I then went about trying to restore the data from Norton's online back up site. I needed to do so from a different computer , because Norton crashed the original computer at boot-up. I could retrieve a limited amount of data, but not all of it. I spent more than 7 hours over 4 calls with Norton support. Their support was very poor and they frequently provided wrong information.

I was finally told that I could only restore the data back to the original machine from which the data came, and it had to be running Norton 360. I explained that the original machine crashed every time I loaded 360, so I need to download the files to another machine and then transfer them manually. Their plan was to completely change the settings on my new machine to be identical to the original machine, including serial number, etc. I then decided to ask for a refund.

Well, it ends up a refund is not so easy if you bought the software from a retailer. If you bought online from Norton they will give you a refund immediately, but if you bought from a retailer you need all original packaging, original receipt, everything.

I've purchased a lot of Norton products over the years and they could see when I installed, what the product key is, etc., but that was not good enough. Their answer was "don't buy from a retailer, buy online directly from Norton."

So I wasted weeks of my time troubleshooting, hours on the phone with Norton, and bought unnecessary hardware, all thanks to Norton.

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Norton 360 _ Works Fine

Strengths: All In One Security

Weakness: N/A

I sure had my doubts about buying Norton 360 because so many consumer reviews were negative.

I decided to try it for a year and I'm so glad I did.

Norton 360 works like a charm. Have no complaints. It has not slowed my computer down.

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Norton 360 - Saved me and I have no problems to...

Strengths: Automatic back ups to my external hard drive saved me dearly. I have none but I have an 250 internal and 500 gig external HD with a high end MB, 4 gigs RAM and above average processor so it doesn't bother me like some of the other reviewers.

Weakness: None and I purchased in October 2007

My suggestion, especially if you claim to be making a living with computers, is you should have better than a 80 gig hard drive and 512 ram. Come on you can't run anything these days with only 512 RAM. That review should be wiped off the system. Norton 360 can be set up to run automatic back ups. Thank goodness I did this because a couple of months after the installation of 360 I had a power surge that caused an unrepairable bug to my internal HD. I could not get the computer to boot and neither could my geek who owns a successful computer repair business. We had to install the os from scratch and I thought I lost everything. Unknowingly and to my great satisfaction the Norton 360 software backed up all of my critical and not so critical data to the external hd. We have installed on all of our business computers and have external HD's to save the back ups. Please understand that you may still lose all your valuables if you don't have an external drive.

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Hang on to Spybot and Registry Mechanic

Strengths: Disk Defragmenter

Weakness: Anti Adware/Spyware, No Registry Cleaner

Norton 360 allowed a piece of ad-ware to get by today (Apr 10, 2007). Spybot caught it thought. The PC Tuneup feature is surprisingly mediocre and does not clean up the registry. I recommend PC Tool's Registry Mechanic to keep the registry clean. My biggest gripe is that it's hard to tell what 360 is doing without going to the Task Manager.

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Norton 360

Strengths: Because of bogus backup program it has none....

Weakness: Absolute Crap CRAP BACKUP PROGRAM and EXTREMELY DANGEROUS TO YOUR DRIVES

Well here I go again writing about this crap .... Last Wednesday I was prompted again and again to set up The Norton Backup ...I had not as it is crap with only 2GB of storage unless you want to pay for it. I choose to save the backup to my local external 500 GB drive and selected a new folder to put it in.. Later my new notebook crashed...I finally was able to recover it to pre Wed Norton crap.... Low and behold my external drive is wiped clean...norton wiped out 5 years of work and all my files and mail and thousands of family pictures. It replaced the name as Norton BAckup Drive and has rinky dink small amounts of C drive and D drive data there...the years of work wiped out...this BACKUP is a piece of ~!#$!@#$%@$%!@#$% and you can't even get to their support..online it just bounces you to QNA garbage and of course it won't have any of this real nasty stuff there...

Whatever you do ...go to McAfee instead of Norton 360...you pay more but the backup won't wipe your drive....

I have to use PC Tools now to recover the drive...and hopefully will get it all...I just can't believe this crap did that.... it is absolutely a piece of crap... it took me 4 months the last time another 200 gb external drive crashed and I recovered it...PC Tools does not put it back the way it was...rather captures everything including all deleted files and you have to recreate EVERYTHINGH!!! I am sick to my stomach...

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Norton 360

Strengths: Seems to protect

Weakness: hard to get installed first time, and get settings like you want

It is probably the best I have had to date, but it is not the easiest that I have tried., but may be the best. Once installed it seems to update like it says, and seems to protect. Both wireless and wired computer

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Both product and techSupport are toooooo bad

Strengths: nothing but problems

Weakness: all over

when installing it hanging up forever, never finish the installation; called techSupport in India for 6 times, spend more that 10 hours, but problem has never been fixed.
Give up. I won't buy Norton any more.

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It stinks

Strengths: ???

Weakness: The live update stopped working after the first update and never really gave me a reason why. Tech support is non-exsistent.

The entire package came with my PC as a trial run. I'm glad I didn't buy it because I'd be really irate. It really doesn't do anything except get in the way. I since then turned it off and have been using the Vista security features (lesser of 2 evils).

Good luck!

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If the only problem would be that it's a resource...

Strengths: none really

Weakness: blocks so much good software it's ridiculous, incompatibilies, slows down everything a LOT

if only norton would have kept the bad things it has been doing for years... no they added some I think. Above the rest of the problems I think there are two: false positives and incompatibility with many programs. The funny thing is that it's also almost impossible to remove (even with the appropriate tool, you'll keep a piece of it somewhere it seems)

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Does what it should.

Strengths: Very user friendly. Have not experienced any adverse effects on PC performance - it does slow down a bit when running LiveUpdate, but that is it.

Weakness: After installing it on a Vista based PC, had to reinstall it twice. Was it Vista

Had it on an XP PC before the latter died (5 yo, heavily used laptop) - worked great, did not slow down PC (Unlike McAfee total protection which I uninstalled after a months use). After switching to Vista, had to reinstall it twice in the first month - whether due to Vista, or Norton, I have no clue. However, ever since (4 months) it has been running smoothly.

Update 05/27/2008
I decided to downgrade my rating of Norton 360 after Symantec "upgraded" it to v2.0. It does come with more bugs and user "unfriendly" environment - frankly I do not know to which product to resort any more.

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Symantec Norton 360

Testseek.com has collected 23 expert reviews for Symantec Norton 360 and the average expert rating is 78 of 100. The average score reflects the expert community’s view on this product. Click below and use Testseek.com to see all ratings, product awards and conclusions.

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