Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This is my revised review of Norton 360 version 2.0. I previously had given a positive review and my review was rated as "The most helpful favorable review". However, after extended use of the product I have to remove my first review and mark this product as DEFECTIVE. I believe that if the professional review sites that have given this product positive reviews were to run extended trials and followed a policy of revising their initial ratings that they also would drop their ratings after they find that the product starts failing after extended use. I installed the Norton 360 version 2.0 trial edition downloaded from Norton's website and ran it for 13 days on my Windows Vista SP1 PC before activating it. During that time my system did not have any noticeable computer slowdowns and it ran in the background without any need for intervention. It also ran just fine for another 7 days after purchasing a license and activating it. Sounds great, right? Well, in my second week of owning it, Norton 360 v2 suddenly started having "Service Framework" failures and told me I should reboot my PC to ensure stable operation. I found that I better heed the warning and reboot, because my Quad core PC with 3 GB of RAM would turn into a brick that barely functioned. This is really, really annoying when you are in the middle of doing something and suddenly you have to interrupt your work to reboot the computer... oh and saving your work takes about 10 times as long since the computer suddenly doesn't want to function. I went through tech support and they had me try a lot of different fixes, including doing a complete uninstall and reinstall of the product. Doing a reinstall actually seemed to make things better for a few days and then suddenly Norton 360 decided it was time to start failing at random intervals again. I looked on message boards and found that some people claimed that there might be a corrupt file on your system that Norton was scanning and failing on. The problem with that claim is that is 1) Reinstalling the product and doing a "comprehensive" scan didn't cause a failure so I don't think that is really the root cause and 2) even if that was the root cause, if a security product like Norton is going to crash when it finds a corrupt file, then exactly what value does the product provide? Do you really want to go on a witch hunt for corrupt files on your computer every few days when Norton starts failing on you? BOTTOM LINE: I wish I could recommend the product, but I CANNOT RECOMMEND. It simply is DEFECTIVE. When it works, it works great, but it is NOT STABLE and I believe that any installation of it WILL EVENTUALLY START CRASHING EVEN IF IT SEEMS TO WORK AT FIRST. If you decide to buy anyway, here are a few notes: - By default eavesdropping protection is turned off. You can enable it via the settings page. I saw in a professional review that they really recommended turning this feature on. - You need to ensure that any other virus or firewall programs that you have installed are fully uninstalled before installing this product. Having multiple competing products installed can really mess up your system. I used the Norton removal tool from their web site to fully remove the trial version of Norton Internet Security that I was using prior to installing this software. - If you are uncertain about this product, download the free trial from symantec first, but note that my problems with the product didn't show up until about day 20 of having it installed. - If you choose to download the full version of the software from symantec, they place a copy of the full version under C:\ProgramData\Symantec Temporary Files on Windows Vista. Just grab a copy of the software and back it up. This way you don't have to pay to have an "extended download period". Or just keep a copy of the trial version around since it allows you to activate it using the product key that the symantec store gives you. - If you are deciding between purchasing the shipped package from Amazon or Symantec, I would choose Amazon in a heart beat. Amazon customer service rocks. You also could probably download the trial version from symantec, buy the package from Amazon, and then just enter the product code from the Amazon package in the trial software once the Amazon package arrives.