Look at www.virusbtn.com VB100 Results.

The quick: The Norton branding needs to go away. The product subsists on it's popularity (people know about it).

Most people in IT know that Symantec Corporate/Enterprise antivirus engine is a different animal than the consumer-based Norton retail products.

While it is entirely too easy point and laugh at what has become of the Norton product line, people should consider taking a look at what has been published on the VB100 awards over at www.virusbtn.com.

The latest test does not even list the "Norton" branding as a contender, although Symantec is listed, and ranks high.

As a consultant, I try to recommend proper antivirus/antispyware solutions to clients. At this time, I currently recommend SAVCE 10.1 (10.1.5.5000) Enterprise edition to business clients. It works well and I very easy to centrally manage via a console. GPO deployment is nice to have too. I am often asked about buying the end-user desktop version instead. -I try to shoot that down as a possibility imediately.

The Norton product is designed for "ease of use" and to be cosmetically easy to look at. The ease of use portion works right up until you try to walk a non-technical user through opening up the bundled firewall to allow traffic on service port 3389 (RDP/Terminal Services) so they (usually business managers/owners) can connect from home to the office over VPN. The VPN will work, connecting to the workstation will not, and the owner does not know why.

It (Norton) has been a resource hog an every single computer I have seen, up to and including custom built systems running a QX6700 and 2GB DDR2 performance memory, and a negligible commit charge for monitoring processes.

What I have been doing is trying to redirect users to either Trend-Micro, Kaspersky, or Webroot (Webroot runs a desktop version of Sophos).