Problem - Thunderbird Gmail Norton

[SueDonim]

The original problem at the beginning of this thread started after a Thunderbird update  and resolved when a Windows update came through. So although I was open to suspecting Norton being the problem, I have no real evidence that it was.

Could be, equally possible Norton pushed out an update in the background and it wasn't until the restart for the windows update that it took effect...  One of the irksome things about IT is that it is quite often difficult to pin down exactly which component has failed on you - sometimes you just gotta take the win when it is back to normal...

That sounds perfectly logical. When the Thunderbird update came through nothing seemed to change at the time, then did after the Windows update. Which does bring me back to my earliest comment which was to suspect that something was a temporary mismatch and would sort itself, but seemed to be taking longer than I expected. That's when I started to get nervous and look a bit more closely.

I'm well aware of how difficult in can be to pin things down. I spent many years being the systems person and expert in our specialist applications whilst needing IT for the bigger picture and when things really went wrong and I know that it can all get very complex.

[SueDonim]

You can never go by many of the online reviews. MANY are paid for. ( read between the lines)

The Comment  "ESET goes deeper into the computer to look for malware but Norton is better at stopping it at the gate."

TOTAlly DISAGREE with the last part of that statement, you want to know the number of computers (and I'm talking Hundreds) that are infected with people using Norton thinking their computer is clean  ??  Just yesterday on a customer's PC, HAD Norton, uninstalled and installed Esets - found  5 infections within 1/3 of the scan.

One other you mentioned is actually more of an infection than antivirus --  TotalAV, most of the time the amount of malware it installs is beyond belief.

This goes back to the 1st point, you can never trust review sites, look at the 1st reply on this forum  https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comme...alav_scam/


Why do you think several people from THIS forum recommend Eset ?? Because they actually work in the IT industry ( myself for over 20 years)  and KNOW what it can and cant do.

I did look seriously at ESET because of the advice here. I also asked for pros and cons of both and pretty much just got back that Norton slows the computer. That's not an obvious problem in that this computer does what we want and Norton has been on it for 5 years.

I am well aware that reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt which is why I looked for and at a variety of sources. My initial confirmation bias would have been on the side of getting rid of Norton, but along the way I learned more about what's going on with some of the things that were annoying me and decided I can live with them. I can see that Norton's customer service is pretty non-existent but this has been the first time I've even looked at what they do or don't provide. And overall I found enough commentary that showed both Norton and ESET to be very good but it seemed to me that Norton is probably best for our needs. This time. I'll review again before next year's renewal. In the meantime, using Norton in conjunction with Malwarebytes has served us well so far and should be safer than using only MS Defender.

I didn't look very hard at TotalAV and if I had I would have picked up that it looks dodgy. I only put it on my list because it came up in some reviews and I was curious, but backed off pretty soon anyway. By then I had also looked at other well-known products like Kaspersky and crossed them out.  I was curious enough about TotalAV to look it up again today and found that there seems to be a huge confusion between similarly named companies of which one is a scam and the other probably not. I don't have the time or inclination to try and unravel it since I don't intend buying anything from either.

[nzoomed]

You can never go by many of the online reviews. MANY are paid for. ( read between the lines)

The Comment  "ESET goes deeper into the computer to look for malware but Norton is better at stopping it at the gate."

TOTAlly DISAGREE with the last part of that statement, you want to know the number of computers (and I'm talking Hundreds) that are infected with people using Norton thinking their computer is clean  ??  Just yesterday on a customer's PC, HAD Norton, uninstalled and installed Esets - found  5 infections within 1/3 of the scan.

One other you mentioned is actually more of an infection than antivirus --  TotalAV, most of the time the amount of malware it installs is beyond belief.

This goes back to the 1st point, you can never trust review sites, look at the 1st reply on this forum  https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comme...alav_scam/


Why do you think several people from THIS forum recommend Eset ?? Because they actually work in the IT industry ( myself for over 20 years)  and KNOW what it can and cant do.

I did look seriously at ESET because of the advice here. I also asked for pros and cons of both and pretty much just got back that Norton slows the computer. That's not an obvious problem in that this computer does what we want and Norton has been on it for 5 years.

I am well aware that reviews need to be taken with a grain of salt which is why I looked for and at a variety of sources. My initial confirmation bias would have been on the side of getting rid of Norton, but along the way I learned more about what's going on with some of the things that were annoying me and decided I can live with them. I can see that Norton's customer service is pretty non-existent but this has been the first time I've even looked at what they do or don't provide. And overall I found enough commentary that showed both Norton and ESET to be very good but it seemed to me that Norton is probably best for our needs. This time. I'll review again before next year's renewal. In the meantime, using Norton in conjunction with Malwarebytes has served us well so far and should be safer than using only MS Defender.

I didn't look very hard at TotalAV and if I had I would have picked up that it looks dodgy. I only put it on my list because it came up in some reviews and I was curious, but backed off pretty soon anyway. By then I had also looked at other well-known products like Kaspersky and crossed them out.  I was curious enough about TotalAV to look it up again today and found that there seems to be a huge confusion between similarly named companies of which one is a scam and the other probably not. I don't have the time or inclination to try and unravel it since I don't intend buying anything from either.

Ive seen TotalAV around a fair bit and it certinaly appears to be somewhat of a scam/bloatware with little to no protection and is quite invasive.
Personally I would stay well clear of Norton along with McAfee, Trend micro and Kaspersky.
Ive also found often that some infections slip through Norton that the likes of Eset would detect, meanwhile it will have a hissy fit if you try and run a safe ip scanner or password program.
Norton is not as "slow" as it once was, but its far from something thats high performance, the golden days of Norton are long gone and is just a name these days thats trying to hold on to its history.
To be honest you are probably no worse off using the built in windows security these days.

[nzoomed]

You can never go by many of the online reviews. MANY are paid for. ( read between the lines)

The Comment  "ESET goes deeper into the computer to look for malware but Norton is better at stopping it at the gate."

TOTAlly DISAGREE with the last part of that statement, you want to know the number of computers (and I'm talking Hundreds) that are infected with people using Norton thinking their computer is clean  ??  Just yesterday on a customer's PC, HAD Norton, uninstalled and installed Esets - found  5 infections within 1/3 of the scan.

One other you mentioned is actually more of an infection than antivirus --  TotalAV, most of the time the amount of malware it installs is beyond belief.

This goes back to the 1st point, you can never trust review sites, look at the 1st reply on this forum  https://www.reddit.com/r/antivirus/comme...alav_scam/


Why do you think several people from THIS forum recommend Eset ?? Because they actually work in the IT industry ( myself for over 20 years)  and KNOW what it can and cant do.

Completely agree, the amount of infections i see on machines running Norton is ridiculous.
Way back in the day about 20 years ago I used to work for someone obsessed with Norton, I was getting fed up with all the machines bought into the workshop full of infections that Norton could not remove.
He didnt want to change and I ended up going against his word because i was sick of the amount of machines I had to deal with in the workshop infected with viruses and every kind of malware/spyware you could think of.
So i downloaded a trial of Nod32 on the company computer behind his back to prove a point and the rest if history, I could pretty much remove 100% of the infections every time and this was at a time where there was an absurd amount of malware coming to the scene that most antivirus companies were struggling to deal with.
After that, my boss became a reseller of Nod32 overnight.

[king1]

one of my biggest annoyances is AV software that removes all my password recovery tools from my flash drive - I constantly have to remember to disable the AV before using it... In fact that's when I knew Microsoft Defender was getting quite good, when it started doing that...

[nzoomed]

one of my biggest annoyances is AV software that removes all my password recovery tools from my flash drive - I constantly have to remember to disable the AV before using it...  In fact that's when I knew Microsoft Defender was getting quite good, when it started doing that...

Yeah I try and avoid using my flash drives as much as possible these days.
I miss the days when the earlier drives had a write protect switch on many models, was quite a handy feature.
Im quite surprised how well microsoft got it with windows defender, its probably the single best move that Microsoft made in the security space.
Whats more annoying is trying to get around all the loopholes when trying to download from Nirsoft because most broswers are blocking these downloads nowdays.

[king1]

one of my biggest annoyances is AV software that removes all my password recovery tools from my flash drive - I constantly have to remember to disable the AV before using it...  In fact that's when I knew Microsoft Defender was getting quite good, when it started doing that...

Yeah I try and avoid using my flash drives as much as possible these days.
I miss the days when the earlier drives had a write protect switch on many models, was quite a handy feature.
Im quite surprised how well microsoft got it with windows defender, its probably the single best move that Microsoft made in the security space.
Whats more annoying is trying to get around all the loopholes when trying to download from Nirsoft because most broswers are blocking these downloads nowdays.

I use a batch file and wget to download those sort of files.  Do that periodically and sync to a flash drive... 

The odd tool like adwcleaner gives you grief because its not a direct download link to the file...

[nzoomed]

Yeah I try and avoid using my flash drives as much as possible these days.
I miss the days when the earlier drives had a write protect switch on many models, was quite a handy feature.
Im quite surprised how well microsoft got it with windows defender, its probably the single best move that Microsoft made in the security space.
Whats more annoying is trying to get around all the loopholes when trying to download from Nirsoft because most broswers are blocking these downloads nowdays.

I use a batch file and wget to download those sort of files.  Do that periodically and sync to a flash drive... 

The odd tool like adwcleaner gives you grief because its not a direct download link to the file...

yeah wget is handy in those instances, ive used that on occasion to install chrome.
Cant say ive ran into issues with adwcleaner, but doesnt surprise me.