CA Internet Security Suite plus 2008 (complete package)

I typically see the pros and cons of products pretty well, but I am hard pressed to see any pros to this package. It installed pretty easily, and promptly slowed my computer to an absolute crawl. Even after a few hours of setup for the firewall (required to make it work at all), it still would not function correctly. It allowed traffic that I had explicitly refused, and disallowed traffic that I wanted to get through. Disabling the firewall did manage to drop my CPU usage down out of the high 90% range, so that appears to be the major resource hog. However, a security package without a good firewall is pointless. On a couple of tests, the av portion of the package caught about two out of three problem files on repeated scans.

Finally, my biggest gripe is the plugin for web browsing in Firefox. Even after uninstalling the package, I had to go into Firefox and click disable/uninstall. Once I did that, I expected it to be gone. No dice. It is still there, and still enabled, but no longer gives me the option to uninstall. To add insult to injury, these plugins block the installation of any additional plugins, and no amount of reinstallation of Firefox and registry cleaning seems to get rid of it. To date, I am stuck with an unwanted (and theoretically uninstalled) plugin that has taken over Firefox. THat is pretty much a definition of a virus (albeit more annoying than a real problem)... I thought I was trying to protect, not infect!

I have to laugh at anyone that posts a "0" rating followed by comments like: "This product slowed down my computer!" or "This product let me get a virus!" without posting their computer specs or a general rating of their computer skills with the post. Most of the negative comments with this product are from user-error. I found the product easy to install, very simple to use, and decent at detecting virus/spyware threats. It is not the best by any means, but it does a good job. I know the version from my ISP did not run on Windows 7, and the spyware program runs separately from the antivirus unlike some competitor products. Not many other complaints besides that.

As soon as I installed it I notice my computer running alot slower. I thought It was a registry issue or may just needed routine software maintenance. So I did all the disk clean-up, defrag, registry cleanup and a bunch of other software maintenance. Nothing helped, infact, my machine got slower by the hour. I finally un-installed it at everything went back to normal. Never again will I use this suite, not if I want to get any work done!