Re: AV and firewall recommendations

Tech-Archive recommends: Fix windows errors by optimizing your registry

From: Newbie techie (anonymous_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 02/20/04 

Date: Fri, 20 Feb 2004 14:36:06 -0800

Thanks all for your recommendations. A question for Carey: By recommending the all-in-one Norton solution are you saying you'd recommend the Norton firewall over the built-in XP firewall? I hate to add additional drag to the O/S if I don't need to. But IF the Microsoft firewall is just a bare-bones basic utility that's relatively easy to breach, I'd need to know that so I can protect myself better.

As for resource usage, well, yes, everything has its cost. But my experience is that Norton specifically, and all-in-one comprehensive packages generally, tend to be very bloated and use far more than their fair share of resources. That's certainly the case with Norton 2003 under ME (where, BTW, 384 Megs of RAM has proven inadequate for ravenous Norton & ZoneAlarm). Ironically, I think at least part of Norton's bulk is due to the anti-piracy secretware they install automatically without the computer owner's permission. Sure, they have a legitimate claim on their intellectual property, but ironically their zeal to protect their rights (against me, a paying customer!) will most likely send me to another product.

Sorry: Touched on two sore spots: software bloat and software doing things without the computer owner's permission... *sigh*