I have Norton 360 installed on my laptop, running Windows XP. Recently I got hit by a virus (worm?) that, over a period of two to three days disabled all my Win32 services. It also disabled Norton 360.
My concern is that Norton 360 could not detect this virus or even warn me about it. I have now spent a lot of money having the hard drive formatted and all the software reloaded. This is costly not only in repairs but also in lost business.
I trust you are aware of this problem and will be able to solve it because I am scared to use the computer if Norton 360 cannot give me the promised protection. What do you suggest?
First, you did not have to spend all the money to reformat your hard drive and reload all your software. You could have
A) Reformatted and reinstalled your OS your self
B) Removed the malware w/ or w/o N360
Now, this may have very well been a virus missed by Norton. However, that is highly unlikely. There are a number of ways this could have happened, if we knew your computer configuration more in-depth. When I used N360, my computer was always clean.
If you work in a hostile enviroment, you can try ThreatFire. It is very very light and supplement's N360's heruistics, which, frankly are rather weak. NIS09 improves on the heruistics, an unreleased beta in May scored ~41% compared to the 2008 release, which scored ~18%.
Thanks for the reply; it is sincerely appreciated.
Point taken regarding the virus and then the solution :-)
I agree with you that I should go back to Internet Security. I used Internet Security since its introduction and only this year decided to purchase 360. I was bitterly disappointed as I have endless problems with live update and other functions. I have had to download patches almost every month and then run the fixes. This I never experienced with Internet Security.
I really do appreciate this reply. Thanks very much for the advice on ThreatFire. I do hope never to use it Unfortunately no rescue disks or OS disks came with the laptop. In addition I was unable to access the bios menu. I explained this to the manufacturers tech support and they said that in their experience this was becoming more common and that I would have to bring in the laptop for formatting and reloading of the OS. They could not explain what went wrong or identify the virus (malfunction) as their answer was just to reformat.
Tech0utsider wrote: You will want to use ThreatFire. Several threats slipped past NIS09.Good option. You also might want to run a scan with superantispyware
I have Norton 360 installed on my laptop, running Windows XP. Recently I got hit by a virus (worm?) that, over a period of two to three days disabled all my Win32 services. It also disabled Norton 360.
My concern is that Norton 360 could not detect this virus or even warn me about it. I have now spent a lot of money having the hard drive formatted and all the software reloaded. This is costly not only in repairs but also in lost business.
I trust you are aware of this problem and will be able to solve it because I am scared to use the computer if Norton 360 cannot give me the promised protection. What do you suggest?
Unfortunately no rescue disks or OS disks came with the laptop. In addition I was unable to access the bios menu. I explained this to the manufacturers tech support and they said that in their experience this was becoming more common and that I would have to bring in the laptop for formatting and reloading of the OS. They could not explain what went wrong or identify the virus (malfunction) as their answer was just to reformat.