Nav2006 first impressions

I’m not impressed. The product ships with virus definitions dated the 12th July and running Liveupdate says there are no new defs to install (but did install product updates the first time I ran it). However the pc upstairs running Nav2005 has definitions dated the 20th July. This might not be too bad on its own if it wasn’t for the fact that NAV constantly complains that the defs are out of date and to run live update. This complaining takes the form of popup messages in the corner of the screen and a yellow coloured caution bar containing a triangle and Norton in the bottom right of the screen next to the system tray. Why they couldn’t have just put the application in the system tray like everyone else I don’t know. Right click on Norton status and select Move to System Tray.
The one plus point to having the bar is that when the application silently crashes you can tell because the bar disappears which is more noticable than having an icon in the systray disappear (which can happen with xp hiding icons when it feels like it). Yes, Nav has already crashed on me once and the only reason I noticed was because my email server refused to connect to any of my pop3 accounts yet I could ping them ok. Nav crashing had taken out the forwarding part of the proxy service but was still capturing the outgoing traffic – just not forwarding it onto the mail server. As the bar had vanished I realised what the problem was and restarted the application (and said YES I KNOW THE DEFS ARE OUT OF DATE)
Another plus point is that I can now use Google Desktop search again as it is compatible with Nav – it wasn’t with Nod32 although this isn’t really a plus point to be honest.
The beta only lasts another 14 days (although their website says 30) and I’m glad as so far the product is really awful. The initial scan of my hard disk took 6 hours for the 100gb of data (how did i get that much so quickly?) and the machine was pretty much unusable at this time as the response time was awful. It wasn’t too bad if only one application was used but switching applications would take at least 60 seconds before the new one was available.
I have posted these points to Symantec with at their feedback page and had no response back from them whatsoever. I think a beta program really should have a feedback forum so that it is possible to tell if anyone else is having the same problem and provide an ongoing support conversation with Symantec.

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