Can someone please explain to me the differences between 'Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition' and 'Norton Antivirus 2004'. I have installed and tried both. 'Norton Antivirus' seems to slow down the computer immensely, while 'Symantec Antivrus Corporate Edition' seems to have no effect on the system. Also, when I open documents or spreadsheets in Word and Excel they seem to take much longer to open as it says that 'Norton Antivirus' is scanning the files before opening. But with 'Symnatec Antivirus Corporate Edition' the files take no extra time to open and also it does not say that the files are being scanned. In other words it seems like 'Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition' does nothing at all whereas 'Norton Antivirus' scans and watches everything on the computer which also leads to a major system slow down. Now what I really don't understand is, if 'Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition' provides as good protection as 'Norton Antivirus' without slowing down the system, then why does Symantec/Norton not use the technology of 'Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition' in 'Norton Antivirus Home Edition'.

all i can say is Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition is the way to go.

dont think it isnt protecting your pc, to tell you the truth its doing a better job.

Norton Antivirus 2004 is a bloated crap heap. You dont pay about 10x more for corporate version for no reason

(mind you, i use kaspersky antivirus... but before that i used symantec corp)

SAVCE costs $250.

if thats aimed at me, i was just really pointing out corporate was more. i didnt really mean it was 10x more.

lol not u just pointin out savce is much more expensive than norton

Where did you get that price? Academic pricing for SAVCE is $33 per license plus $20 per copy of the media you want, and even less in quantity. We pay about $500 for 25 licenses at work.

Thanks for all the answers, but one question still remains. If 'Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition' provides as good or even better protection as 'Norton Antivirus' without slowing down the system, then why does Symantec/Norton not use the technology of 'Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition' in 'Norton Antivirus Home Edition'.

I can only assume its because people want all the pretty screens that NAV has than SAV doesn't.

But I am referring to the underlying technology not the fancy screens, which should not make a difference on how fast a word document or excel spreadsheet opens. BY the way one difference I have noticed is that in Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition there are no options to set for various messengers (Yahoo, MSN, AOL etc.).

um for the messenger programs why would you need extra 'bloatware' to say it protects you from viruses over msn ect.

you kinda get the choice to accept a file...

it protects your email aswell, thats all you need

Thanks all. I am convinced of the superiority of Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition, it's just that I want to understand the differences and more importantly try and understand why would Symantec not use the technology from their corporate version in the home version considerign that the home version sucks so much in regard to system resources and in dramatically slowing down the whole system.

The above quote is a response I got from someone on 'msfn.org' forum. Does this reply pretty much sum things up? If it does then it leads me to wonder why, Norton Antivirus due to it's extra plugins, does a more thorough job protecting against viruses, albeit at the cost of system speed. Should it not be 'Symantec Antivirus' that is more thorough, since as quoted above, the corporates have more "dire" needs. The lack of a nice GUI in a corporate product is totally understandable, but why less protection (I assume that because of less plugins)?

It's simply not true that SAV offers "less" protection. It just expects a higher level of knowledge from the user (or admin).

For instance: In corp you (until version 9) didn't have a pop3 scanner for attachments. Is that less safe? Not at all, because you might be able to open an attachment but before the code can launch it is stored in your temp outlook folder, and picked up by you realtime protection.

The difference, Corp will never tell you with a popup that realtime is not launched, you have to know yourself, it will not tell you by default that your definitions are running out of date, or that you haven't done a system scan in 2 months.

All those "extra's" require extra services running in the background, and thus extra resources. But I can imagine that Norton 200X does a better job in protecting a computer novice that needs the assistance of the program (i.e. flashy scrrens and pop-ups) to keep it up to date.

Actually, Corp DOES do those particular things. What it doesn't do is support every email program under the sun. Up until 9, it only had plugins for the most common corp email apps (Outlook and Notes). In 9, they added a plugin that monitors POP traffic, but still doesn't actively monitor any other email apps. So, if you are using Eudora and IMAP, the only thing SAV is going to scan is attachments when they're saved to disk.

The difference is that the corporate version you dont need a CD key, or that you can install it on as many computers as you wish, I forget, but the regular version only allows you to install it on one computer, unless its like one of those "two user" editions, but corporate means its for a whole business or company, so you can install it on all the computers.

Just because you can do so doesn't make it LEGAL however. You still must buy a license for every computer you install it on.

And there are a lot more differences, mostly in reporting and distrubution aspects.

What I want to know is why Norton Antivirus scans all 'Office' files upon opening whereas Symantec Antivrus does not.

Because SAV is intended to be used in a corporate environment where the software loaded on your PC is hopfully legit and there is hopfully some sort of overriding control over what's allowed to get to the machines its loaded on (corporate firewall, AV gateway, packet filters, etc).

When in a corporate environment, things are SUPPOSED to be more secure, so less emphasis is made in corporate versions to amanage every aspect of a PC, and more is made on reporting so a problem can be found by the admins before it spreads. This way, an admin can just remove any users who have repeated problems, rather than pray that software is keeping everything safe.

Thanks for all the replies. It seems obvious that Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition is the way to go.

I like the bit where Illrigger sais heehee.

Come this way Mr. Johnson it won't hurt ...