Norton 360 subscription add-ons are a rip-off

Many of those so-called features you listed are in the regular Windows updates, assuming you are using Windows. For mobile devices, Android or Apple, drivers are not (or very rarely) updated individually but apps are - and that usually happens automatically.

My current LG notebook has an LG app that does driver and updates, but has never found one because the Windows update does everything that is needed.

As for viruses and malware, unless one goes to risky web sites Windows default works fine. Some of the AV sales pitch creates unnecessary fear and paranoia to get buyers on board.

As for broken registries, it is usually best not to mess with them because ‘fixing’ something usually has one of two outcomes - one being it breaks the registry and the computer does not work properly, two being there is no discernible improvement in performance.

Also modern computers often have SSDs rather than HDD devices. HDD (hard discs) need an occasional defrag when they get more than about 80% full (a historic number relevant to many things computer) but SSDs do not and defrag software has mostly been updated to ignore them. FWIW defragging an SSD as if it was a HDD will shorten their useful life. The optimisation for an SSD is called TRIM, a different process.

Whatever you do, educate yourself on what is value added for yourself and circumstances versus what is profit added to the vendor for no/questionable value to yourself.

Some related and a bit dated topics include (updated this year)

and a few you can find using the Community Search tool, good and less good, that ‘dodgy default’ to auto-renewing.

Popular AV products include Bitdefender (Romanian) and AVG/AVAST (Czech Republic). Kaspersky was once highly regarded but as a Russian company many no longer trust them. Just because a company is based in a western country (Norton and McAfee - USA) does not make them the best. There are other good AV products and suites beyond those I mentioned.

If you choose to shop around use your internet search on the products of interest, discount sites that claim to be ‘the best of’ in their names because they survive on clicks and are often partial if not outright dodgy and look for relevant magazine and respected tech outlets such as PC Mag, CNET, and a few others as well as Choice. Just because a site is an .org instead of a .com does not necessarily give it more credibility.

5 Likes