Symantec to Acquire PowerQuest

Strengthens Symantec's Offering in Active State Management

SYDNEY --NSW - September 24, 2003 -- Symantec Corp. (Nasdaq: SYMC) today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire PowerQuest Corporation. The acquisition is intended to combine market-leading deployment, imaging, provisioning, storage management, and disaster recovery technologies into a new enterprise solution for managing, protecting and recovering servers, workstations, laptops and handhelds, called Active State Management. The acquisition, conditioned upon customary regulatory approvals and PowerQuest shareholder approval, is expected to close by the end of 2003.

"Active State Management is a critical component of the cradle-to-grave management system needed to effectively manage the creation, protection and recovery of servers, desktops, laptops and handhelds," said John Schwarz, Symantec president and chief operating officer. "As security becomes a significant factor in ongoing infrastructure management, the combination of security and imaging technologies, along with Symantec's strong channel presence, will be a powerful force in bringing our customers new IT management capabilities that leverage the convergence of systems and storage management."

"PowerQuest has pioneered the concept of Active State Management, an innovative way of using imaging technology to better build, protect and recover servers, workstations and laptops. The Active State Management architecture uses proven imaging and partitioning technologies as its foundation," said Paul Winn, PowerQuest president and CEO. "PowerQuest's key technologies, including virtual volume imaging and server provisioning complement Symantec's Ghost solutions. The combined company will be able to provide customers the solutions necessary to build, manage, and protect their IT infrastructures."

PowerQuest's industry-leading storage management products, services, and solutions enable an enterprise to effectively build, manage, and protect corporate data systems and their data. PowerQuest provides imaging and deployment, system migration, and management of system updates with its deploy solutions including PowerQuest V2i Builder and PowerQuest DeployCenter Library.

PowerQuest solutions including PowerQuest VolumeManager, PartitionMagic Professional, and ServerMagic allow enterprise customers to quickly add new storage, reconfigure existing storage, monitor and manage storage devices, and easily plan for the future. Enterprise organisations can quickly create backups without bringing servers offline, rapidly restore systems back to a specified point-in-time, and immediately recover individual files and folders without the inconvenience of traditional recovery methods using PowerQuest V2i Protector. PowerQuest V2i Protector complements Symantec's existing line of anti-virus products, and provides a second line of defense against computer viruses and worms

In addition, PowerQuest offers a wide range of products to help OEMs and system builders reduce the time required to set up and configure new workstations, deploy software applications, or recover from a disaster. PowerQuest's personal products are designed to meet the data management and imaging needs of desktop computer users and include PartitionMagic, to create, resize, merge, or convert partitions without destroying data and DriveImage, imaging software for disaster recovery, backups, and system upgrades.

About PowerQuest
PowerQuest Corporation is a global provider of automated deployment and recovery solutions for corporations and individual users. Based on the company's Virtual Volume Imaging (V2i) technology and Active State Management (ASM) architecture, PowerQuest products and services simplify the management of storage through the technology lifecycle. PowerQuest products are available directly from the company and through a network of partners in more than 34 countries. More information is available at www.powerquest.com.

About Symantec
Symantec (NASDAQ: SYMC), the world leader in Internet security technology, provides a broad range of content and network security software and appliance solutions to individuals, enterprises and service providers. The company is a leading provider of client, gateway and server security solutions for virus protection, firewall and virtual private network, vulnerability management, intrusion detection, Internet content and e-mail filtering, remote management technologies and security services to enterprises and service providers around the world. Symantec's Norton brand of consumer security products is a leader in worldwide retail sales and industry awards. Headquartered in Cupertino, Calif., Symantec has worldwide operations in 36 countries. For more information, please visit www.symantec.com.au

NOTE TO EDITORS: If you would like additional information on Symantec Corporation and its products, please view the Symantec Press Center at http://www.symantec.com/PressCenter/ on Symantec's Web site. All prices noted are in US dollars and are valid only in the United States.

Symantec and the Symantec logo are trademarks or registered trademarks, in the United States and certain other countries, of Symantec Corporation. Additional company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of the individual companies and are respectfully acknowledged.

PowerQuest, V2i, PartitionMagic, V2i Protector, V2i Builder, VolumeManager, ServerMagic, Drive Image and SmartSector are trademarks or registered trademarks of PowerQuest Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

FORWARD LOOKING STATEMENT: This press release contains forward-looking statements, including the positive effects of the PowerQuest acquisition, expected activities, and other business results that involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause our actual results, levels of activity, performance or achievements to differ materially from results expressed or implied by this press release. Such risk factors include, among others: the ability to successfully integrate the PowerQuest business; the sustainability of recent growth rates, particularly in consumer products; the anticipation of the growth of certain market segments, particularly enterprise security; the positioning of Symantec's products in those segments; the competitive environment in the software industry; general market conditions, fluctuations in currency exchange rates, changes to operating systems and product strategy by vendors of operating systems; and whether Symantec can successfully develop new products and the degree to which these gain market acceptance. Actual results may differ materially from those contained in the forward-looking statements in this press release. Additional information concerning these and other risk factors is contained in the Risk Factors sections of Symantec's previously filed Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended March 28, 2003 and the form 10-Q for the fiscal quarter ended July 4, 2003. Symantec assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking information contained in this press release except as otherwise required by law.