I've been watching this thread for some time and it amazes me that Symantec seems to have been lumped in the same class as McAfee. I thought that McAfee was primarily in a single market; namely virus protection. Symantec on the other hand, dominates much of the computer utilities market. Aside from making ACT!, PCAnywhere, Norton Utilities and Norton Antivirus and a host of other programs, Symantec has over the years merged with others such as: Central Point Software (makers of PCTools and Central Point Antivirus), Delrina (makers of WinFax Pro, WinComm, and the Opus and Bill Screen Saver, among others), and the XTree Corporation (makers of XTree Gold). These are well-known, popular programs that many of us use every day at work and at home. We all have Peter Norton to thank for making an undelete utility commercially available. Symantec has a much wider range of successful products than McAfee. I think that Symantec is a bargain even at $14 a share compared to McAfee's $40+, but time will tell.
On another note, I have been very unhappy with my McAfee Antivirus products for Windows NT. This includes both VirusScan and Netshield. Apparently many others have been also. If you don't believe me you can see for yourself just by visiting their technical support postings at their Web Site.
IMHO, NetShield is practically worthless. When activated, it would crash my HP server randomly several times a day. It never found any viruses. VirusScan still produces a red system event on every NT 3.51 (service pack 4) workstation that is loaded on, despite McAfee's updates to their product. The only time it has ever kicked in was for a false positive on a virus that it could not remove. A later product update showed that this had been a software bug. To be fair, McAfee offers real time virus scanning, a feature that I do not believe Symantec has as yet. I think that the real time scanning must be very difficult to implement under Windows NT. Very few software packages on the market have this feature. So far, my experience with the ones that do has been that they cause one problem or another when activated on our file server. Last week, we tried Dr. Soloman's software and immediately had several user document files corrupted by the real time scanning. When I tested Symantec's product, it was just a basic scanner that had to be scheduled and had no real-time checking. But at least it installed and removed cleanly, and it did not disrupt either the server or any workstations. I am still in the market for a better real-time virus protection solution. For now, I'll have to keep using McAfee's somewhat flawed Antivirus products.
Just for the record, I do NOT work for either Symantec or McAfee.
-Howard Partridge |
