Advice on Norton 360

I guess I'm late for the party. And so are you, since the beta phase is long over.

Did you take part in the tests and what's your opinion?

Personally I think it is a good idea to combine the various features that Norton 360 offers. Also I just love the idea that I can back up my files directly to their serves and retrieve them even if my house burns to the ground. (Not very likely scenario, I know, but there is some stuff on my PC that would make such an experience so much worse ...)

Norton360 was already released more then a month ago.

The good about it: It seems to do exactly what it's suppose to, which is protecting your system and optimizing it by defraging your HDD when necessary.

The bad: I realized that you don't have much control for specific stuff such as which HDD to scan for AV for exemple. It's either full scan or nothing at all. Also, I had to uninstall it on my desktp because it doesn't support dual-boot system. Since I couldn't ask for specific scan and disk defrag, I was effraid it would screw up my XP partition when scanning from Vista since both HDD appears as C when using this OS and as D when on the other OS. Imagine what that could do when defragging if the file extension don't equal that of the HDD in that OS. I don't know much about dual-boot system, I tought until recently that Vista and XP would be either on the C or D drive, but not both at the same time depending on which OS I'm using.

Luckily for me, my laptop isn't dual-boot and I still have one activation left because it wasn't installed on XP yet when I discovered that.

Overall, it's a good "install and forget" AV, but not something I'll recommand to anybody that wants to controll what is happening in his system. I reinstall Avast on Vista just like it is in XP and everything is running fine right now. Only pain is that I still have to reactivate it, but I'm awaiting Avira Vista 64-bit AV (due april 18th) first to make sure I won't switch again.