Norton 360

1/10 Don't Waste Your Time or Your Money

bburres - 01/29/09

I've been using Norton 360 for over a year for two features, anti-virus protection, and an online back up service. Both of these failed. My wife's laptop with Norton 360 installed and up to date virus definitions got infected with a virus in December. The virus took over Norton and disabled it. I reinstalled Norton, updated the virus definitions, and tried to root out the virus. Norton didn't help. I checked their online support and indeed they couldn't provide a fix. At this point I reformatted the drive and reinstalled Windows and all applications, including Norton 360. I began receiving Windows fatal errors, which pointed to Norton. Their online support claimed it was a memory problem. I replaced the memory, and for good measure replaced the hard drive. Another new install. Everything worked fine until I installed Norton 360. I was then receiving continual fatal errors. I uninstalled Norton, switched to McAfee, and everything works fine. I then went about trying to restore the data from Norton's online back up site. I needed to do so from a different computer , because Norton crashed the original computer at boot-up. I could retrieve a limited amount of data, but not all of it. I spent more than 7 hours over 4 calls with Norton support. Their support was very poor and they frequently provided wrong information. I was finally told that I could only restore the data back to the original machine from which the data came, and it had to be running Norton 360. I explained that the original machine crashed every time I loaded 360, so I need to download the files to another machine and then transfer them manually. Their plan was to completely change the settings on my new machine to be identical to the original machine, including serial number, etc. I then decided to ask for a refund. Well, it ends up a refund is not so easy if you bought the software from a retailer. If you bought online from Norton they will give you a refund immediately, but if you bought from a retailer you need all original packaging, original receipt, everything. I've purchased a lot of Norton products over the years and they could see when I installed, what the product key is, etc., but that was not good enough. Their answer was "don't buy from a retailer, buy online directly from Norton." So I wasted weeks of my time troubleshooting, hours on the phone with Norton, and bought unnecessary hardware, all thanks to Norton.