I have to agree with Athena, most peoples opinions are swayed what they hear or read from somewhere, and most people have a fundamental distrust of Big Companies to begin with. :suspiciou

When your a :evil: "NORTON" (A brand everyone has heard of) we expect a exceptional product better that its rivals, and get even more angry when it doesn't deliver the goods as well as some lesser-known ones do. :haha: (BIG DEAL, Welcome to REALITY) We put our trust in big Name-Brands we all know but we should'nt, companies small or large only care about one thing - DOLLARS$$$
Besides that, Male or Female just pick the right topic and most people just love a good bitching session to vent their frustration and anger :angel:TO CLEANSE THE SOUL

Thanks Athena, its nice to see someone understands how others viewpoints can alter our own opinion. Truth, is only what you believe. If your given biased or misleading information and believe it, then it becomes your truth even if it is false.
I know, i bought a Sony DVD player because "Its a Sony".
WHAT A PIECE OF CRAP!!! My fault i believed in the name "Sony" instead of doing a bit of research first,(oops) but I dont hate Sony and all their products. I blame myself for buying the DVD player and just called it "a lesson learned" - end of story.

I know others feel the need to vent thats fine, GO FOR IT but just try and keep it in perspective and stick to the actual facts for others who read your posts.

Cheers All.

One should keep in mind that hardware companies have different product lines. One can make devices with more or less features using better (expensive) or worse (cheaper) material and processes.

The cheaper products are some no-name chinese crap with a new paint job and a shiny logo. Then there's the middle range that is products ordered from more famous OEM manuafcturers (NEC or Philips or whatever) with a new paintjob and a shiny logo. And then there's the high end products that may be in-house designs, but may as well be in-house designs from some other company with a new paint job and a shiny logo..

When you buy a Sony, don't go for the cheapest crappy Sony, buy something that is above the middle point. (And do compare with similar products from competition).


A software company doesn't need product lines. Their "product", once finished, costs virtually nothing and they can put arbitrary price tags on their stuff.. Make the toolbar a different colour, add a new menu and quadruple the price. Disable a feature and add a time limit (ten minutes of programmer time) and give the thing away for free as shareware. And actually it is one and the same product!

Ive used Kaspersky for years now. I would never look back.

well there are some companies that arn't all too bad, and worth the $$$ you pay for, provided you do research beforehand.. and with mcafee some of us dont have much of an issue with, just blameing everything on norton is habit jks..

i'd reckon and most of the guys here would agree to is that norton Ghost was the best thing that happened in the whole computer universe (from being a norton, they were once a great company) as it did all these crazy and USEFULL things, and it was absolutely perfect.

Keyword there being "usefull", although that phrase unfortunately ended in 2003 when Sysmantec Corp bought over Disk imager (or some company with names along that line) and thought "gee, i think consumers will like this.." and started to think and tehn in their usual style add more and more crap ontop (but version 10 hasnt reached that level of crap as their AV brothers).

sorry for that outburst.. but it must be stated, that Ghost is slowly heading towards consumer death (dont know how ghosts can die but hey.. norton?) and the function of purely copying a hdd image from one place to another is not the priority of Ghost anymore, like it was first designed to do, and did well... therefore i'm taking the extreme and making sure i never loose my norton ghost 2003 cd.. as the numeric versions after it wont be backwards-os compatible (v9, v10) and dont have PCDOS anymore, just a windows elements stripped down..

and to keep with the current conversation, my house is Sony free, exception for the bin outside which has a broken headphone in it with the word 'sony' running on the side of the earpiece =)

N30

Symantec had really good products in the 90s, mainly because they bought the right companies and did not cripple the software acquired.

Norton Commander, Norton Utilities (must be hundreds of times when Norton Disk Doctor saved my ****), Norton Ghost, Norton Guides (I didn't have any assembly books) were all great stuff.

Ghost and Utilities still live on as horrible giant parodies of the sleek utilities they one were And Partition Magic shows that Symantec is unable to make good use of purchases either.

If you are very fastidious, there is no need to have an anti-virus program on your computer at all. I've been without one for the last year. Every couple months, I do a scan with trend micro, and it always comes up with nothing but a few cookies. Not using Internet Explorer is probably a wise decision, too.