Average Rating: 
Rating:  - Get Norton Firewall or Internet Security 2003
This is a good product, but the 2003 line is better. Both of
these software packages contain an OUTSTANDING ad blocking
feature. After installation, I visited numerous sites which had
previously dumped loads of pop-up and pop-under ad windows and
flash-based ads on my screen, but now -- POOF -- no more trash,
with no discernable negative effects on web page loading. Plus
ad banners are effectively eliminated--so all you get is the web
page you want. After a week of intensive use, I have yet to find
a problem with this software. I find it difficult to praise
this product enough--it delivers every feature smoothly and
efficiently, as advertised. I have it installed on my computer
along with Norton Cleansweep--no conflicts or flaws noted.
Rating:  - A detailed personal firewall
I just had a few miscellaneous comments to make.Norton Personal Firewall is one of the three main packages out there offering this capability, along with Fail-Safe Technologies ZoneAlarm Pro 2, and McAfee's own McAfee Firewall software. These products work by monitoring all TCP/IP and IP Port activity on your system, and by acting (hopefully intelligently) on such activity when it occurs to keep the bad guys out of your system. I run this under Windows XP, and so far it's worked quite smoothly. The program is more complex and is more difficult to configure if you want to customize the settings than ZoneAlarm Pro 2, but that's to be expected given all the extra options. Since I use this for a home PC, I may not need all the extra filtering and customizing capabilties that this offers, but it's okay. You have it if you want it. I switched over to this program when I had some conflicts with ZoneAlarm Pro 2, although I like the simpler, more intuitive interface of it better than Norton. The conflicts may have been with Netsonic's Netboost caching program, rather than with Norton Anti-Virus, and I still need to do a better job of troubleshooting to nail that down. If I can resolve the conflicts, I might switch back to ZoneAlarm Pro 2, for one reason. I can't seem to figure out how to configure Norton so that it pops up an alert whenever a program trys to access the net, so that at that point you can decide whether or not you want to permit it. You can set up logging so that it monitors everything, and you can even set up customized rules that are fairly detailed, but not this. I figure there has to be a way, but what with the extra complexity of the program I just haven't seen it yet, but I've looked at all the screens. One thing Norton does implement better than ZoneAlarm Pro 2 is what it calls "Intrusion Detection." This pops up an alert when port-scanning is detected. ZoneAlarm Pro 2 does this simply by alerting you to every inbound attempt to communicate with your system, so it's really no different, but if it works right, you'll be informed of actual port scans whereas ZoneAlarm Pro 2 may not tell you that's what happening, it'll just say there was an unauthorized attempt to communicate with your system. Obviously, there is a trade-off here between a program's ease of use and how much the developer wants to communicate to the user (who may not be that technically literate) all the details of what the firewall is seeing that's going on "under the hood." Since I was a professional NT system administrator for many years, I'd like to know about it just for general curiosity's sake, although it's probably not that important for most people. I can't comment on Norton's product versus McAfee's, since I haven't used it myself, but I'd be interested in knowing how it compares with the McAfee offering. Anyway, so far Norton's Personal Firewall has worked quite well and I'm very satisfied with it. I'll be extremely satisfied with it if I can just figure out how to do that one thing I mentioned.
Rating:  - Big disappointments
Norton Firewall 2003 failed to install correctly on my Windows XP Pro machine with 512MB of memory! Every time I tried I got a blue screen with "Dumping physical memory", despite following the installation procedures to the letter. When I finally managed to install the program, it blocked a large number of websites, including symantec's own! And yes, I allowed pretty much everything on the setup screen. I finally gave up after three days, wrote the investment off and downloaded Black Ice. Installed correctly the first time, has been running with no problems whatsoever and has caught 20+ hackers in the past 24 hours. I am sure my experience with Norton Firewall is down to my failing somehow but I do not have the time and the patience to "investigate".
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