Symantec'd To Distraction
by Paul McGoldrick
Peter Norton is a man of my generation, although not my tastes. I have
never ascribed to the idea of shaving my head either for religion or to play Lex Luthor in a Superman screenplay.
But you have to admire the difference he made to the PC industry -- even
when wearing that damned pink shirt.
Selling out to Symantec was smart (have Symantec ever actually developed a product of their own?) but selling them his name with the deal was unfortunate, at best. I have just come out of a week of dealing with the company's shortcomings and I am not a happy camper.
It seems that the year just rushes along before you start to get pinged by Symantec about renewing your subscription for one of their anti-virus applications. Like most people, I suspect, I left it until a couple of days of the subscription expiring before making the time to do it.
Should be easy, right? I, probably foolishly, decided to upgrade my "package" to include some Adware protection. The company took my money very readily -- with the new threat that they will automatically take my money next year too on the same credit card -- and I took the download.
Would it install? No, no and no!
I then got into the help loop on the Symantec web site…
Symantec has a help system on line they call their AutoFix Tool, but it has just a tiny little problem -- it can only be used in Internet Explorer. I am one of those engineers who avoids IE like I would back off from a cholera epidemic. (Been there, done that, you don't want to know the story.)
One of the wonderful things that this useful tool made me do was to uninstall my current version of Norton Anti-Virus. To say the least, I was concerned. On-line with no virus protection, and in IE.
Did the AutoFix tool allow me to install the new version of the software? No! Next step -- into the Windows Registry at their request; not a place I really want to be…
Did anything let me install the new software? No!
I turned off the computer before anything got worse.
Next day I bought a hardcopy of McAfee VirusScan 2006. It loaded extremely quickly and it immediately began to spit out virus alerts. I registered on line, updated the software and then ran a full scan: 2892 viruses, Trojans and unwanted programs! That was 2892 in less than an hour unprotected on the Internet.
McAfee cleaned up 2805 of the problems itself. The remainder I had to go in and manually delete, including the last two that were hiding inside a fakely-named folder.
So what did I learn from this? First, don't deal with a company that only allows you to use IE. Second, don't deal with a company supposedly in the security business that deliberately puts its customers at risk.
I am not going after Symantec for a refund of my money. It simply isn't worth the time and effort, just to get insults hurled at me about what I should have done. But they have lost my business forever. And being in Internet publishing means not business from just one computer.
And an added moral: never tick off a journalist with bad service…
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