Norton Internet Security 2007 Review

October 2006

Our first encounter with Norton 2007 was somewhat disappointing. One of our clients had a new machine and wanted to download Norton Internet Security 2007.

It seems that the download methods have changed somewhat. In prior versions we were able to download the installation file and put that on CD along with the message with activation key. That way, if NIS had to be reinstalled, you had everything you needed. It appears that Norton has changed things where they are directly installing the software. You no longer get an installable executable. (we may be wrong on this). If you want the ability to reinstall the software at a later time, you need to pay an additional $10 to have Norton keep your installation for one year. This means that the actual price is about $10 higher than you expected. We suggest that, if you are going to purchase NIS 2007, you wait until it is available on CD. That way, you can reinstall it easily if needed.

The next bit of aggravation was that you need to login to access your account. Fine, except that the client could not remember their password. We tried several times to request a password reset through the login page. We never received the email. This has happened to other clients as well. Fortunately, they had another email address they use so we simply set up an account under that address.

The install process went fairly well. We didn't like the look of the new control panels. They seemed to be a bit tacky. However, we could live with that.

The final straw though came when the machine would not allow other machines on the network to access it. When I went into the control panel, the only option that would work was that you could type in individual IPs to allow them to access your machine. In a DHCP network, this is useless. The option to recognize the network, that worked well in NIS 2005 and 2006, would not work. We then called Norton's tech support. It took a few minutes to get a rep. However, they wanted $19.95 before answering any questions.. We decided to hang up at that point. Since there were only a few machines on the network, we switched from DHCP to static addresses.

I'm not sure why Norton 2007 would not allow us to recognize the network. We will update this page as we get more information

Summary

We didn't see any real improvements in the user interface from the previous versions. Home users might want to opt for one of the free antivirus applications such as AVG along with the Windows firewall. Small business owners might want to consider MacAfee or the new One Care suite from Microsoft (3 machine license for about $20-40).

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