Customer Review(s)
Customer Rating: 



Summary: Not much to complain about
Comment: I bought this after reading a number of good reviews in computer magazines, although the negative reviews on Amazon made me a little nervous. It's been over a month now, and I really can't complain about the program. It does everything it was advertised to do, including antivirus, software firewall, and spyware blocker, and it does so relatively unobtrusively. There hasn't been a noticeable hit on resources, although startup is a little slower as the program checks for updates on the internet.
My old firewall - Zonealarm Pro - worked well, but it was very annoying with the constant popups asking about permissions for specific programs. Norton NIS did that in the beginning also, but it went away once I made a change in the preferences to not show these messages.
Overall, you could probably get by with a collection of free programs to do the same thing that Norton NIS does (e.g. AVG antivirus, Zonealarm basic, Spybot), but the convenience of having a single program makes up for the cost.
Customer Rating: 



Summary: Faster and Use Less Memory?
Comment: Recent advertisements from Symmentec states that Norton Internet Security 2008 runs faster and uses less memory than 9 different competitors. But please check out the actual test study by PassMark software: Boot time for NIS 2008 is at 87% that of Kaspersky Internet Security 7.0 (100%), and scan time is at 91% that of Panda Internet Security 2008 (100%). Also, the study DOES NOT measure CPU and memory usage during local file scanning, which explains why so many people complain about the speed of this software. All this data points against Symmentec's recent advertisement claims in terms of practicality.
A software can claim it runs the fastest and uses the least memory...when the computer is off. What do you think of that?
I have the same problem as other people who install and use this product. SLOW!!! My computer is a 3.0 GHz with 3 GB of memory and 200GB of hard drive space, running
Windows XP Professional. After spending nearly 10 minutes installing NIS 2008 and rebooted my PC, I saw a tremendously difference on my PC performance...that is, TREMENDOUSLY SLOWER. It took nearly twice as long to boot up my computer now.
I do a lot of Word and Excel editing for work. When I was typing and Norton's antivirus scanning started, sometimes I had a hard time moving my mouse cursor. This alone can tell you how much memory the scanning program uses.