Norton Antivirus continues to be the best antivirus program for most people – but it has had its share of annoyances. Many people found that online subscription renewal was broken. There was a bug that caused outgoing mail to be sent incredibly slowly if NAV was scanning it. This web site has a list of NAV gripes.
Now a bigger problem: Norton Antivirus 2003 is “protected” by the dreaded “digital rights management.” If you purchase and download a copy of NAV 2003, you will be unable to install it on more than one computer. As far as I know there’s no DRM in the boxed version of Norton Antivirus 2003.
That’s not necessarily unfair or unreasonable – but it can be very annoying if you’re not expecting it. Intuit just raised a huge flap with annoying or broken DRM features in this year’s release of TurboTax. Doesn’t matter, though – expect more software to be restricted. The extra revenue is too tempting for the software manufacturers to resist. (And for what it’s worth, don’t switch to McAfee products just because of this issue. McAfee products cause far more problems than DRM, in my experience.)
