>>Mike,
>>
>>This is attributed to MS: Microsoft conceded last year that its security software was intended to offer only "baseline" performance, saying it wanted to "give customers a good reason to pay for their [security] products" because that would create greater diversity in the market and make life harder for malware writers.
>>
>>We switched back to Norton a few years back after it woke up and lost the bloat, delivering efficient systems that no longer paralyze your machine. Very happy with the decision. These days there are fake sites promoting various products but in mainstream reviews the various mainstream products jostle for the top position so you might as well pick one and stick with it.
>
>I've been using Norton almost religiously for several years now and have been very happy with it.

Never had much confidence in Norton Antivirus -- considering the numerous times that I'd be removing viruses from co-worker's systems. I usually ended up finding out about the virus while doing server backups when McAfee would trigger all sorts of alarms. Norton wouldn't detect those viruses until weeks later (on the co-workers home system -- which was also supposedly protected by Norton).. And when Norton AV did eventually detect the virus, it couldn't remove it -- I'd usually end up removing it successfully using McAfee. I'd eventually migrated to Bitdefender, then to Kaspersky and Avira. After getting rid of Norton off the systems at work, I'd not had a major virus incident -- which is good, as the usual routine of me spending half a day cleaning out infected computers got to be a pain (especially trying to explain to the boss why I was "wasting my time" removing viruses).