Why do you say that you can't believe that people still use it in this day and age? Does Norton have a reputation for being absoluately terrible that I'm not aware of?
Background: my partner is an IT technician. He works in the school that I attended when I was younger. We originally met when I was still in school.
About 9 years ago, before I was in any way IT literate, my mum had a computer running Norton AV. It was slow, and not just because the hardware of the time wasn't up to spec - Norton was seriously hogging the resources, and the computer was loaded down with various viruses. We didn't know this at the time, and I had my partner - the IT technician - make a personal visit to my home on a weekend to see if he could fix the problem.
He was working on the computer from around lunch time on the Saturday until near 11pm, and then had to return again on the Sunday, just to get the computer back to a safe, useable state. Norton AV was replaced with AVG, and that computer never had problems again.
Case 2
My partner knows a nice lady called Brenda. She had a laptop, given to her by her son, that was also running Norton AV. We've been round to fix a few issues on multiple occasions, but none more 'stunning' than the time my partner removed Norton and installed AVG and Spybot; the virus/trojan/etc count totalled over 1000. I have no idea how that machine was even running.
Case 3
My colleagues work machine, also running Norton. I removed it last year and installed Avast. As well as finding a couple of issues, the overall performance of the computer improved remarkably.
Apart from those 3 specific incidents, over the past few years I have advised multiple people online to remove Norton and install something like AVG or Avast, and the response has always been positive. At the end of the day, even ignoring my experience, I could never trust a program that has to be released with a "removal tool", because the uninstall process doesn't remove the program from the system properly.
I can confirm that. Long before I started using Linux and OS X, I had an oldish Windows PC that had Norton on it. Replacing it with AVG not only sped up my PC, AVG also got rid of several hundered pieces of malware.
Case 1
Background: my partner is an IT technician. He works in the school that I attended when I was younger. We originally met when I was still in school.
About 9 years ago, before I was in any way IT literate, my mum had a computer running Norton AV. It was slow, and not just because the hardware of the time wasn't up to spec - Norton was seriously hogging the resources, and the computer was loaded down with various viruses. We didn't know this at the time, and I had my partner - the IT technician - make a personal visit to my home on a weekend to see if he could fix the problem.
He was working on the computer from around lunch time on the Saturday until near 11pm, and then had to return again on the Sunday, just to get the computer back to a safe, useable state. Norton AV was replaced with AVG, and that computer never had problems again.
Case 2
My partner knows a nice lady called Brenda. She had a laptop, given to her by her son, that was also running Norton AV. We've been round to fix a few issues on multiple occasions, but none more 'stunning' than the time my partner removed Norton and installed AVG and Spybot; the virus/trojan/etc count totalled over 1000. I have no idea how that machine was even running.
Case 3
My colleagues work machine, also running Norton. I removed it last year and installed Avast. As well as finding a couple of issues, the overall performance of the computer improved remarkably.
Apart from those 3 specific incidents, over the past few years I have advised multiple people online to remove Norton and install something like AVG or Avast, and the response has always been positive. At the end of the day, even ignoring my experience, I could never trust a program that has to be released with a "removal tool", because the uninstall process doesn't remove the program from the system properly.