I've used Norton Internet Security for as long as I can remember, and I consider it the best out of all that I've tried, I had a brief period when the firewall was playing up about 12 months ago but they soon updated it and it was sorted. It might be a resource hog but I've never noticed it, I lose about 1,000 in Aquamark once it's installed.
People do have problems installing it, I've been asked on numerous occasions, to help people with installing the package, and on every occasion, the persons concerne haven't read the instructions properly, Symantic could improve the install considerably.
Every time I have to reinstall Norton it was becomming a pain to do all the updates and whatnot. There are a couple easy steps you can take to update the CD with some newer files so you can bypass some of the updates later on.
First, you can update the "LiveUpdate file." If you are currently running any Symantec product, odds are you have LiveUpdate. Might want to check what version you are running and update it if need-be. I found on a lot of my PCs I was running 2.6, and the latest version is 3.0.
Symantec Downloads Page: First, download the liveupdate .exe file: lusetup.exe
Second, download the Intelligent Updater Package, it would be under product updates Virus Definitions, just navigate to do it manually, it's not too hard to find.
Then I copied my NIS 2005 Antispyware Edition CD to a directory on my PC. All the Antivirus / NIS have similar directory structures so it should be pretty generic to do this.
First, to update the live update file, navigate to the supportlupdate directory. Replace the lusteup.exe file.
Second, extract the Intelligent Updater Package, use winrar, it's a sfx file. Inside those extracted files will be a virscan.zip file. Extract that file into its own directory. Compare those files you just extracted with the files in the virisde directory on the CD image. There should be the same number of files and names. Delete all the old files and the copy over the news ones.
That's it, now burn that temp directory onto a new CD and your program is a little more up to date. This is especially useful if you want to do the pre-scan before installing norton.
In theory it would be possible to update some of the other things. Live Update keeps temporary files of everything you download, you just have to dig around in the documents & settings directory. You could then probably take those files, extract them, then update the corresponding files on the CD. But I find that having Live Update plus Virus Definitions up to date is the most critical. The rest of the updates are usually less than 5MB.
If you are having problems with your virus definitions updating, or live update in general, you can dowload the two files and it will update your existing install.
