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Symantec Competing Unfairly Against Spybot?
frankbaird writes "Symantec has been claiming for months that the anti-spyware program Spybot-Search & Destroy corrupts Norton Ghost images. Spybot has tried to convince them this is a false positive. After having been ignored, and this is the second time Symantec has claimed a false positive against Spybot, the makers of Spybot have gone public. They claim that rather than compete fairly with quality products, Symantec is resorting to libel."
I routinely pull computer images (Ghost 8.0 Corporate Suite), but that I've seen, there has never been a problem with spybot corrupting the image files. Of the several hundred gigs of images that we have stored, only one has ever gotten corrupted, that I can recall. That one image was of a computer that was most certainly not running Spybot though.
In my opinion, anyone who has been attentive to the computer industry in the last 8 years has seen plenty of evidence that Symantec is to be avoided. Such a person would have seen the amazing number of serious bug reports. Often Symantec is even worse than Microsoft in attentiveness, and that is extreme.
We stopped using Symantec software, other than to buy copies and test them, many years ago when a Symantec technical support representative cheerfully explained that the very misleading operating system error message we were getting was due to Symantec software being corrrupted by another program. The other program? Symantec WinFax Pro.
In recent years, Symantec technical support has been very angry and adversarial. It is not difficult to guess that things are not going well inside the company.
My experience is that Symantec has a high percentage of employees who know almost nothing about technical things. Such employees are cheaper to hire; I imagine that is the reason.
It's interesting that the few posts here that say they've had no problems with Ghost/Spybot have been using Ghost 8. As I mentioned in another post, Ghost 9 and 10 are repackaged versions of Drive Image, which were obtained from PowerQuest. They have nothing to do with prior versions of Ghost except for the name. Does anyone here have any experience with Ghost 9 or 10 and Spybot?
Be a real patriot: Question authority. Think for yourself. Formulate your own conclusions.
I tell you what, remove your Symantec Ghost and use a better and free (as in beer and speech) product called QtParted.
Nor I. I work in a small ISP's callcenter, with aorund 5 other people. Norton products are the bane of my goddamned existance. Half the time you have to disable outgoing email scanning or you just cannot send email, period. Timeout errors all the time. Not only that, try explaining to a customer that it's not your service that is down, but rather, their $200 antivirus program that isn't working properly. Not pretty.
If Norton Internet Security suspects that "something's funny" it will randomly turn off your connection. You can ping from DOS, but you can't surf via IP or Domain Names. The solution? First try turning off the Norton Firewall, if that doesn't work, try uninstalling Norton. Reinstalling TCP/IP or Winsock doesn't even help.
I really cannot tell you how many times I've gotten a random "it doesn't work" call, only to find out that they have Norton and it's causing problems. It's my first question now when someone is having oddball problems with email or DNS errors. "Ah, I see. Do you have Norton on your system by any chance?"
It is important to note that the problems only started in 2003, previous versions of Norton products were fine. In addition Symantec has posted a security warning About their own products. Seems the latest version of their product uses the same trick that Sony's rootkit used.
Oh, and did I also mention that NIS destroys Secure website access even after uninstalling it, unless you fix it by digging through it's options?
If you want a good antivirus, I suggest AVG or Avast. Both are excellent free products that are nowhere near as invasive as Norton.
Not only do they suck but they are shutting down all the decent software. My favourite free personal firewall - Sygate has just been bought out by Symantec and guess what:
;-)
Important Notice: Effective November 30th, 2005 all Sygate consumer firewall products will be discontinued.
Well they'll have a hard time stopping me from using it. If anyone else thinks it was a good product too grab it from their site before they realise it's still there
You are kidding, right? It has been years since Norton Utilities did anything useful. The AV scanner and firewall let far too much through, and everything else they install is useless... The spyware scanner is a sieve used as an umbrella, the system cleanup utilities was useful on 98 but now just call software that comes with XP, crash protection takes a ton of resources and never works when you need it to, uninstall is about as successful as the regular windows uninstall routines, etc.
The only really good utilities are premium and expensive anyway, Partition Magic and Ghost. The average user will never need these, which is fortunate as the average user never buys these.
For Antivirus, use AVG. It is solid, low-resource, and free, and people have been using it successfully for many, many years. For a firewall, you want either Kerio Personal Firewall or Zone Alarm. Either is a small, robust, and far more secure than Norton firewall. Kerio is a little more powerful, Zone Alarm is a little simpler. Both are free, and have been around for years.
No antispyware software (especially commercial applications) catches everything, so a cocktail is usually in order. The two I recommend are Ad-Aware and Spybot. They're both classics, they both take low resources and are easy to schedule, and they have different search methodologies and as such catch different types of spyware. They also don't run unless called, so they don't take up any system resources. Combined, the two catch just about everything.
I have heard good things about Counter-Spy, but with just an 85% catch rate, it is still good to run a second application along with it. Likewise, with a 20 dollar yearly service fee, it isn't "fire and forget," and I've seen far too many systems that were unprotected because the credit card on file with their software service company expired.
Take all of the above utilities. Put them on a disk. Write a very small shell script that automatically launches the installers on insertion of the disk and clicks through everything (try PTFB, which can be launched and run from the disk automatically) and adds scheduled tasks to run the software. This shouldn't take you too long. Then whenever a crapflooded machine comes into your office with an expired copy of Norton, just clean it up and pop in the disk. I can't tell you how many machines I've installed AVG, Kerio, Ad-aware, Spybot (or some variant thereof) on, and have never regretted it.
There is a lot better stuff out there. Surprisingly, a lot of it is free. And while people seem to like to pay for software because it gives them a false sense of security, they also like the fact that you can whip out a disk right there and be done in five minutes, hassle-free.
The ______ Agenda
I've used Kerio Personal Firewall (free to home users) for the last several years with no problems. I used version 2.1.5 which is less intrusive than the latest versions which tend to have too many features that are nagging. You can get the last freeware version 2.1.5 here
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Yes, In fact even symantec knows its complete crap, they include the cd to ghost 2003 (the last known good version) inside the boxes for ghost 9 and ghost 10! AHAHAHAHAHH
Have you ever known any company to include the cds of previous versions inside the next version box?