NO Norton Antivirus support after 05?

E

enrights1969

Registered
Can anyone confirm that Symantec Norton Antivirus will not be supporting Mac OS's after 2005?

I could not find anything that supports this but my girlfriend bought a mac yesterday and the salesperson sold us on the fact that nortons wont support mac's after 05 and sold us the .mac suite for 99 bucks which is renewable every year for 99 bucks. She really doesnt need all the other things that go along with the .mac service except the antivirus.

And what are your recommendations for an antivirus for the lastest OS tiger?
And can you only get virex by purchasing .mac?

She would rather not have to pay 99 bucks a year just for virus protection.

Thanks for any and all responses!!!!
 
enrights1969 said:
Can anyone confirm that Symantec Norton Antivirus will not be supporting Mac OS's after 2005?

I could not find anything that supports this but my girlfriend bought a mac yesterday and the salesperson sold us on the fact that nortons wont support mac's after 05 and sold us the .mac suite for 99 bucks which is renewable every year for 99 bucks. She really doesnt need all the other things that go along with the .mac service except the antivirus.

And what are your recommendations for an antivirus for the lastest OS tiger?
And can you only get virex by purchasing .mac?

She would rather not have to pay 99 bucks a year just for virus protection.

Thanks for any and all responses!!!!
Click to expand...
Your girlfriend is confused. Symantec announced that it will drop (has dropped?) development of Norton Utilities for the Mac. It will continue development of Norton Antivirus for the Mac.
 
Why do you need antivirus with a Mac?

Ok, i am sys admin for windows servers and clients. (please dont beat on me) but i know that all systems can get viruses from windows to macs to pda's to cell phones. I think she bought a mac to spite me ( hehehe) but the one thing i want her to make sure she is safe from viruses.


Your girlfriend is confused. Symantec announced that it will drop (has dropped?) development of Norton Utilities for the Mac. It will continue development of Norton Antivirus for the Mac.

She is not confused because i was there when the salesperson told us that nortons would not support the antivirus after 05. He was the one confused or used it as a ploy to sell us more than we needed. I can get antivirus free thru my company and will install it on her pc asap and she will be able to get free updates annually but wanted to make sure before i put something on her pc that wouldnt work in less than a year.


Thanks for your input Mr. Me!!
 
1. Who cares?

2. Norton AV did nothing but cause trouble anyway.

3. Anyone have a virus in OS X yet? Anyone? Anyone at all?

:)
 
I have to agree, it would be a good thing if Norton bowed out.
 
The only time I have used Norton on a mac was when I was rebuilding a network. It was on its knees due to nimda and I had no way to AV the network except for a imac they had in the corner. I just booted it up and set it to start scanning the Novell servers. It worked like a charm. :)
 
There are no Viruses for OSX. The OS has been available for over four years, none, zero, ziltch :)
There are macro viruses that can affect Windows software eg. Word & Excel. If MS Office is installed & used a virus checker just for that might be needed. They are windows viruses though & will not affect the Mac OS.
Another reason I don't use MS software :)

You have to enter a password to install anything at all. Secure by design, the main reason I changed to Mac over a year ago.
 
There are no viruses for OS X - yet.

The only viruses even remotely Mac I have seen in 10 years, are a virus for Mac OS 8.something, and a unix virus that would mod your permissions of certain things to 666. Neither of those would even run on OS X. That with working with Macs and other operating systems.

But the same basic should be anough to protect you that is sane in anhy other OS. If you get a file you don't know what it is, or did not ask for, don't open it.
 
Sadly, if you exchange data with Windows people, you might get an infected, say, Wordfile. The Mac opens it fine in Office, saves it fine - but of course doesn't get rid of the virus. If you then send the file on to another PC person, you might infect that person's computer. So while the virus won't do any harm to your Mac, you might be seen as "sender of a virus", which you might want to avoid. _That's_ a reason for installing antiviral software on a Mac. But otherwise... Not yet needed.
 
My approach is simply this: If a PC person gets a virus, that's their problem. ;)

As far as me getting a virus, I monitor these forums and others daily, so I'll know instantly if something does show up and I'll deal with it then. Until then, I'm not wasting my time and money as well as risking my computer to the nonsense trouble that Norton has historically caused.

Additionally, I do full backups of our file server twice a day, so I'm not too concerned.
 
mindbend said:
My approach is simply this: If a PC person gets a virus, that's their problem. ;)

....
Click to expand...
When a PC person gets a virus, it's everybody's problem. At least, it's a problem if you have a job. I work in a Windows-dominated shop that was "blacklisted" due to the overwhelming number of viruses and other malware that passed through this place. In response to the infestation, our IT people installed a brain-dead virus filter that removed most of the email attachments that I tried to send to colleagues. PDF and .zip files sent from my Mac were deleted, but stuff sent from Windows computers seemed to go through OK. The bottomline is that Mac users who work with computers for a living suffer from viruses indirectly. Anything that we can do to mitigate the situation is to the good.
 
Well .. using OpenOffice on the Mac should then not need the anti-virus with fryke's logic, since most MS Office's macro virii don't infect OpenOffice. :)
 
Are you sure the virus is _erased_ if you use a file with OpenOffice.org? I think not. It might not infect your PC or Mac in the same way, but as long as you send the file to another contact, the virus'll still be there...
 
Smugness is not a virtue.

There may well be at some point a virus that causes havoc in the OS X universe. - let's not set ourselves up for a rousing chorus of "I told you so!" Be cool, be safe.

Enright - I would say the salesman did his job, he hawked another dotmac subscription. It may well be that Norton will drop Mac support (but maybe not) but even if they don't, please be careful with Norton stuff on the Mac. What was once the must-have maintenance suite is now deadly to OS X. Virex is a better option for anti-virus in Mac-land.

Apple - 99 clams a year is toooo steep for dot mac!
 
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