Norton Confidential

Symantec’s products have always been successful in gaining my hatred, always and I don’t have a clue as to why they keep maintaining that.

Whenever I install any of Symantec’s products, the working speed of my computer just gets cut into half. My computers’ vitals go like Intel P4 – 2.4GHz, 1GB RAM. So, in a computer of this condition, when I installed the new Norton security suite called the Norton Confidential, it takes about 3-5 secs for Internet Explorer to open, about 2-3 secs for even the My Computer window to be open. So, I guess you get the situation well. This is why Symatec’s products always get my hatred.

Coming to this beta of Norton Confidential, I guess it is all just looks. Ever since Vista emerged, I guess everyone wants their product to look similar in the sense that they wanna incorporate the details like shading, reflection, shadow and most of all the aqua effect. Judging by the way the installer looks(shown above), I guess Symantec managed to have some success in that.

Just look at the screenshot here. This proved that norton confidential is just a replacement for the Microsoft Windows Security Center. Security suites are always expected to have Virus Protection, Spyware Protection and a seriously strong Firewall. Norton Confidential on the other hand doesn’t have any Virus protection. All it has is a strong firewall(I do agree that it is a good firewall). I am wondering here about what is it in this software that slows down my PC. Actually I don’t know even now.

Now this is the what Norton confidential looks like. Like I said before it is nothing but just the looks. It says that it has “Phishing Protection” and “Crimeware protection”. They define Crimeware as any program that tend to perform identity theft. It says my system is at risk because, I trusted this thing to have an antivirus and so didn’t install it yet.

This takes up a huge portion of the taskbar. Imagine how it will be iff all programs started having such huge systray icons.

This is yet another feature of Norton Confidential and this is the feature that makes Internet Explorer almost impossible to work with. This is the feature that makes Internet Explorer quite buggy because, it make IE go frequently into hang state.

This is part 2 of Norton Confidential. They call it Norton Protection center. It just shows the “security status” of the pC. If you read what is written, you’l find that this is a replica of the Windows Security Center(just looks different).

When I downloaded this beta, Symantec told me that I could try it for 30 days and after 2 days, the software tells me that the trial period is up. How ridiculous can it be?

It promised 30 days but gave me only 2 days.
I had to uninstall it after that.

Thus my time with Norton Confidential ended.