DEL2@phoenix.cambridge.ac.uk (01/26/91)
Santo Nucifora (<SANTO@SENECA.BITNET> asked about Norton Antivirus. I haven't used it but it got a slashing review in PC Business World last week, for making unfair claims about its abilities, (claims "Norton Antivirus is the most complete and comprehensive virus protection utility for the IBM PC and its compatibles", yet only 141 signatures are loaded into memory, in a device driver misleadingly called a Terminate Stay Resident program); for being out of date (despite promised monthly upgrades, nothin had arrived yet); for being comparatively expensive (compared eg with Frisk's F_Prot!!); for using some rather poor techniques and (not least) for not being written by Peter Norton. Quotes from review: ..Using [our set of viruses]... we obtained the following results: percentage of files oin which viral activity was detected -- 80%. Percentage of infections correctly identified -- 56%. .. it detects Casper, V2P2, and 1260 using the same identity ..all Symantec's virus definitions come from the US [so double checks with other programs will give different results because of differing nomenclature] Overall assessment: Pro: nice user interface; both 5.25-inch and 3.5-inch write-disabled disks supplied as standard. Con: misleading documentation; immature product; not enough virus recognition patterns. Hope this is useful. Regards to all, Douglas de Lacey.
p1@arkham.wimsey.bc.ca (Rob Slade) (01/26/91)
SANTO@SENECA.BITNET writes: > I was wondering if anybody has seen or used the Norton Antivirus? Is > it any good? What techniques are used to detect and remove viruses? > What type of preventative measures are used? I have spoken with the people from Symantec, and they have said they will be shipping me a copy right away. Mind you, they said that over a week and a half ago, so you can draw your own conclusions about their customer service for starters. :-) An interesting piece of trivia: apparently they were already working on SAM-PC (Symantec Antivirus for MS-DOS) when they bought Norton, so the package is really a combined project. > North York, Ontario (Do I have to include Canada or is Ontario well know?) You're willing to admit that Ontario is *within* Canada? :-)