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Norton AntiVirus 2002  Norton Anti-Virus is the leading anti-virus program

David Strom     back to top

David Strom thinks Norton Anti-Virus 2002 is a Winner  (October 10, 2001). He may be right, I hope he is right. However, some of the reasons he cites are not valid. 

• He said that NAV 2001 required a few reboots to get everything setup and NAV 2002 did not. The reason NAV 2001 needs so many re-boots is to apply bug fixes to the program. While annoying as heck, it is actually a good thing. The reason NAV 2002 does not require reboots is that the inevitable bugs in the program have not yet been found and fixed. I'm sure that in six months or a year NAV 2002 will also require reboots at install time.
• He notes that both versions (2002 and 2001) allow you to do a clean boot from the NAV CD-ROM to disinfect your PC. This is not a very useful feature as the program can only disinfect viruses it knows about and, I assume, that it will only know about viruses as of when the CD-ROM was created. Also, I suspect that it may not apply if the file system on the computer is NTFS (but I'm not sure). I use NAV 2001 and was not aware of this feature so I looked in the NAV 2001 User Guide (PDF format, documentation version 7.0, PN 07-30-00428). It is not mentioned at all. 
• He says that both versions of NAV allow the creation of emergency boot disks if your computer does not support booting from the CD-ROM directly. With NAV 2000 and NAV 2001 this was only true for Windows 9x/ME, it was not true for Windows NT4 or for Windows 2000. He did not say which flavors of Windows he was discussing and my guess is that he is only focused on Windows 9x/ME. This is a great feature, but it requires constantly updating the virus definitions on the floppy disks. I checked the user guide for NAV 2001 and it does mention that emergency rescue disks are not available in Windows NT4 and Windows 2000. It also warns the user to constantly update the virus definitions on the emergency floppy disks. In addition rescue disks need to be updated when new software is installed and when hardware changes are made to the system. 

Mr. Strom was nice enough to link to my NAV 2001 page (this was before I broke out gripes for NAV 2002 to this page). He was also kind enough to test booting from the NAV 2002 CD-ROM with an NTFS formatted partition and found that it did not work. (October 11, 2001) 

Scot Finnie      back to top

Mr. Finnie loved NAV 2001 but found that he couldn't live without a feature in NAV 2001 that does not exist in NAV 2002. Quoting: "Norton AntiVirus 2002's email protection no longer gives you the option to automatically delete the virus-infected attachments of inbound messages. Instead, it insists on prompting you about what you want to do with those attachments each and every time."  If you get one virus infected message a week, no big deal. However, Mr. Finnie was getting many virus infected email messages every day. NAV 2002 forced him to manually OK the deletion of the virus for every message which involved multiple clicks per message. He complained: "When I contacted Symantec about this through the company's PR agency, all I got was a vague response that the developers might someday add some sort of fix for this, but nothing is currently available."  October 17, 2001. 

Scheduler      back to top

I briefly looked at a computer today that had Norton Antivirus 2002 installed under Windows 2000. I could not find the scheduler. The program was set up to do automatic update of the virus definitions. With NAV 2001 the default scheduling of the auto-update was way too often (IMHO). I was curious to see what the scheduling was with NAV 2002, but could not find the scheduler. It may still be there, I looked only briefly. If it's there however, its not at all obvious where it is. I think I clicked everywhere there was to click while looking for it. December 18, 2001. 

I was using a computer today running Windows XP Home Edition. NAV 2002 was set up for automatic Live Update. Despite this, the virus definitions were 17 days old.  After manually running Live Update, the virus definitions were as of yesterday. There is more than ample opportunity for NAV to download new virus definitions. The computer in question is logged on to the Internet via a DSL connection for many hours during the day. As with the computer referred to above, I again tried to find the schedule of when NAV updates virus definitions but could not. NAV 2002 was set up to automatically install and apply new virus definitions. The option to ask the user first, was not turned on. August 9, 2002. 

Installing NAV 2002      back to top

January 6, 2002. John S. Rhodes at webword.com wrote a long article about the problems and confusion he experienced in installing NAV 2002 under Windows 98. The installation took 87 minutes and involved many re-boots and confusing messages. 

Bug with Pest Patrol      back to top

According to Sunbelt Software, which resells Pest Patrol (version 3.1 as of this writing) there is a conflict between NAV 2002 and Pest Patrol regarding the sending of outbound email. NAV does not let Pest Patrol email out its logs. The current workaround is to disable the NAV feature of virus scanning outbound email. April 25, 2002. 

Live Update Problem     back to top

The computer of someone I know was running Windows XP Home Edition with NAV 2002. Noticing that the virus definitions were very old, I ran Live update. The only Symantec product that Live update knew about was Live update itself. How this happened I don't know. Live update would run fine, find no updates to itself and end quickly. It never got new virus definitions because it did not know that NAV 2002 was installed on the computer. 

After fighting a similar battle with NAV 2003, I knew to uninstall NAV 2002 (which also uninstalled Live Update), delete some secret files and re-install NAV 2002. This fixed the problem and Live update now gets virus definition updates as well as updates to about 10 Symantec products/components. For information on the secret files that I deleted, see the Live Update problem section of my NAV 2003 gripes.

Interestingly, the one year virus update subscription was not extended by the un-install followed by a re-install. November 30, 2002. 

FYIs      back to top

The main tech support for Norton AntiVirus is here. You have to select a particular version of NAV. Symantec also provides an online knowledge base for current products and one for old products.  

A review of NAV 2002 by ZDNet 

Norton Anti-Virus 2001 could be installed and run on Windows 2000 Server. However, NAV 2002 refuses to install on Windows 2000 Server. 

Corporate users should read gripes about Symantec business practices regarding the licensing of NAV. April 24,2002