PCNRTNAV.RVW 950608
Comparison Review
Company and product:
Symantec/Peter Norton
10201 Torre Avenue
Cupertino, CA 95014
USA
408-253-9600
800-441-7234
Customer Service 408-252-3570
Fax: 503-334-7400
416-923-1033
Technical Support: 503-465-8450
BBS: 503-484-6669
Retrieval Fax: 503-984-2490
Norton AntiVirus 3
Summary:
Manual and TSR virus scanning, as well as change detection.
Cost U$130, U$69/C$79 for annual update service
Rating (1-4, 1 = poor, 4 = very good)
"Friendliness"
Installation 3
Ease of use 2
Help systems 2
Compatibility 3
Company
Stability 3
Support 2
Documentation 2
Hardware required 2
Performance 2
Availability 4
Local Support 1
General Description:
The NAV.EXE program has the ability to scan memory, boot sectors and files for
the presence of known viral programs, and to "inoculate" programs to detect
change. It can also recover some damage to programs and boot sectors.
Comparison of features and specifications
User Friendliness
Installation
The program is shipped on three 1.44M "read only" disks, therefore cannot be
infected at the user's site without active intervention.
Network installation assistance is provided in the installation program.
Ease of use
The program is "menu driven", but use without a mouse is not necessarily
intuitive, nor do all menus work consistently. Ten pages of the manual are
devoted to the use of the interface. The menus are, however, generally clear
and readable.
The "Advanced scan" and "Auto-inoculate" features of the system are simply
variations on checksumming and change detection, but are set up and explained
in a manner which appears to be unnecessarily confusing. The options available
in the "Options/Configuration" menu allow for a considerable degree of
customization, but reasons for choosing certain options are not clearly
explained in the initial installation section of the manual. Some options do
not appear to work: I did not chose to "Disable scan Cancel *b*utton" (*b*
being the letter used to access this option), but the "cancel scan" option was
disabled on my program anyway.
If a virus is detected in memory at the beginning of a scan, the program will
refuse to scan further. This is an advantage in that it prevents infection by
viri which infect each file as it is open, but there is no "discretion" on this
feature, and it activates even when boot sector viri are found. The program
does not terminate, but will not perform (in terms of scanning). No help is
given at this point: the user is referred to a section of the manual.
Help systems
The program contains an extensive help file. Personally, I did not find the
onscreen help to be very useful, generally having to go to the of the manual if
I could not figure out the operation from the menus.
Compatibility
Although not stated in the manual, many functions no longer work for CPUs lower
than a 286 level.
Company Stability
Symantec and Peter Norton have both been solid companies in their respective
environments. Symantec has also purchased Zortech, Certus and Fifth
Generation, all of which have been marketing antiviral software and recently
merged with Central Point, which had been following a similar pattern.
Company Support
The company appears to have removed both a technical support line and a "Virus
Newsline" for update information on new viral signatures.
The distribution of updated signature files has been problematic. Initially
they were available only from the Symantec BBS or on CompuServe, where Symantec
runs a support forum. Offers of space on other systems were turned down.
Subsequently, a Symantec representative stated that update files could be
distributed via BBSes, at the same time that other agents were saying that this
was a violation of copyright. At one point a demo version of the program was
stated to be available on "hundreds of bulletin boards worldwide". This was
later found to refer to the Symantec BBS and CompuServe only. Most recently
permission has been granted to distribute the update files from ftp sites on
the Internet. However, no announcements of availability were made and the
future of this distribution is completely unknown.
It should be noted that although the initial program was promised to the
reviewer, that it required eleven return phone calls to five different offices
to finally have it delivered over three months later. Other shipping was
similar, although most recently the package was the fourth to arrive after a
general call for review materials.
The series of acquisitions by both Symantec and Central Point means the company
has absorbed a significant group of antiviral software vendors. This
represents more than a dozen products which have been removed from the market
or had support withdrawn. The buyouts appear to have been done soley to gain
market share. Less than a month after the company had been purchased, callers
were being told that the product support for Fifth Generation products had been
discontinued, and were offered "upgrades" to NAV. To date, only one of the
technologies of the "orphaned" products has been added to the Norton AntiVirus.
Documentation
The documentation is much improved from earlier versions, but still refers only
to program operation and has little general discussion of viral programs.
Hardware Requirements
A 286 or above is required for many functions.
Performance
The TSR scanner is invoked from CONFIG.SYS. While it cannot prevent infection
of the system from a "boot sector" infected diskette, it does not detect the
presence of such a virus in memory, and it neither prevents infection of
diskettes, nor alerts the user to the use of an infected diskette or the
operation of infecting.
Repair of viral programs appeared to be effective on those few for which this
is an option. However, the major option tends to be deletion.
Local Support
Although local sales offices of Symantec/Peter Norton are widely available,
support is only provided through central technical support.
Support Requirements
In its current form, the product is suitable for novice users, but installation
and actions when a virus is found may require more expert support.
General Notes
Statements from former employees indicate serious problems within the Norton
AntiVirus product development group, possibly with regard to management.
Normally, this would simply fall within the realm of mere gossip, but the
almost complete lack of development of the product over the past year tends to
add credence to the rumour.
copyright Robert M. Slade 1991, 1993, 1995 PCNRTNAV.RVW 950608
======================
ROBERTS@decus.ca, RSlade@sfu.ca, Rob Slade at 1:153/733 RSlade@cyberstore.ca
Why did the chicken cross the Moebius Strip? To get to the other.. um.. er..
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94311-0/3-540-94311-0