I Hate Norton........

My next anti-Virus will be AVG or Avast.....
I have been running Norton 2003 for years....I had tried 2005 in '05 and didn't like it took to much resources so went back to 2003..
The last update on Wednesday seemed to go fine until I tried to scan a file....an error window popped up... tried a complete scan...same thing..

Before trying to find anything on my computer...I tried my wife's computer...same problem. That meant the problem was with norton, so I call them...
They call me back around noon to-day and I hand ove remote access to a guy from India..(Both Microsoft and Norton outsource to India)
One of the first things he tried was downloading a portable scanner to my computer to find out if it had a virus (didn't have one)
While he wasn't looking I made a copy of it to a usb flash drive
Finally after trying several things he said that changing both 'c' and 'd' from fat 32 to ntfs would do the trick...The only good thing that came of that was that I will be able to repartition easily when needed...

All in all an afternoon wasted...On top of that he tried to sell me a 2010 internet security
Wonder how much it would have cost in rubles

I tossed Norton years ago....same with macafee.... I was using AVG but am now using avast!.... avast is quick, easy to register the free version, and seems to work like a hot damn.

We dumped the huge Norton and just as huge (resource-wise) MacAfee. We had AVG for a while, but now we are using Kaspersky.

I stopped using Norton eons ago and prefer to stay away from Anti-Virus software, but if I did run something, it would probably be AVG. Back in the day, it was very difficult to actually remove Norton Anti-Virus from my system so once I had a clean windows install, I keep away from it.

If you're not running anti-virus software and you think you've accidentally executed a suspicious file, I usually go online to do my scan with PC-Cillin. Since I've overcome my hate for webmail with gmail, I can download all emails, scanned from my pop3 accounts directly into my gmail box.

I've been using Norton for years without any problems, but am thinking of switching to either Avast or AVG, simply because of the resources used by Norton.

Can you scan single files with "avast"? I rarely scan my whole computer, but I do like to scan any file I download or receive in the mail

Yes, plus avast automatically scans incoming emails and downloads.

Same with Kaspersky.

We got a bug in this thing a while back. It took 5 or 6 different scrubbings with different cleaner programs to get rid of it. The bugger looked at AVG (what we used to have) and laughed at it. We tried PC-Cillin and it got rid of a few of the bug's, but the bug that caused the problem regenerated the files anyway. Not much help.

I'm glad I had some good suggestions from knowledgeable people...
The only alerts that I've ever had with Norton have always been false alerts from some web page script in the temp internet folder and I'd get rid of it just by deleting all the files...
The one time that I ever got a real virus is when I got distracted after I downloaded a file and instead of right clicking on it to select scan with antivirus...I left clicked and all hell broke loose. It disabled Norton, wouldn't let me access trend micro or P Cilin or any other....
I was just lucky I had some restore disks that were only 2 month old but I wasted a lot of time trying other things...

Does avast include a firewall?

The paid version does...the free version doesn't.

USA Avast, not AVG as those turds 'guarantee' protection against viruses but won't actually pay for the cost of clearing your PC if it is infected. This I know from personal experience.

I haven't used Norton for more than a decade. The program was so intrusive that it slowed my computer to a crawl. I eventually uninstalled it and went with something a little faster. I now use "The Shield" which got a fairly good rating. Prior to that I was using "NOD 32" which is also light and effective.