“Norton 360 provides all-in-one protection that keeps you, your family, your PC, and your information secure. This comprehensive solution combines Symantec’s proven, industry-leading computer security and PC tune-up technologies with new automated backup and antiphishing features, providing a full circle of protection”
Granted, it does do all that, and considering Norton’s reputation for resource hogging software, 360 is quite light. It seemed to be fine on a, 2 Ghz with 512 Mb of Ram and WinXP
The problems with this program seem to all stem from this promise:
“Provides a hassle-free user experience”
What that really means is; You, the user must be a complete idiot, so we won’t let you control anything even remotely important! And for heaven’s sake, never, ever, give the user the option to turn off, disable or shutdown 360!!
My first run-in with Norton 360 came yesterday. A friend dropped of her computer, asking if I would clean it up. Like any other “clean-up”, I started removing unnecessary files and attempted a defrag. This is where I met up with 360.
With everything shut down or disabled in the system tray except Norton, the hunt was on.
“How the heck do you shut this thing off!!?”
Now before you start yelling at me, “Norton’s PC Tuneup will do that!”
Yes I know it will, but what if I don’t want to use Norton to Defrag?
What if I just want to do it the old way?
Well, too darn bad!
I spent what seemed like hours trying to figure out how to shut this brute down. I could not find the off switch anywhere! All this hunting, also made it blatantly obvious that navigating through this program, is painful, at best.
Maybe I missed something, maybe I’m blind, maybe I didn’t dig deep enough, but why should I have to look at all?
Right clicking on Norton in the system tray, should give me the option to Exit, Quit, Disable, something! A user should not need to resort to Ctrl+Alt+Del, to sort through the running processes, in order to stop a program.
In the end, PC Tuneup did the defrag.
Keeping with the general theme: “All users are idiots” If you choose not to set up or use the automatic backup feature, Norton scolds you by constantly telling you there’s a “problem”.
Once again, the user is not allowed to control basic program settings.
With 355 days left on her subscription, I controlled my urges to uninstall Norton 360, but you bet, I will be suggesting she NOT renew when the year’s up.
The ideas behind Norton 360 software are great and it has the potential to be a great program, but it needs to be less automated and more interactive.
Technorati Tags: Norton 360, Security, Windows, Anti-Virus,Symantec
December 3rd, 2007 by 
LinuxChick
This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops.
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