posted 2007/06/20 at 14:27
Earlier this year I bought Norton Internet Security 2007 after my Norton Utilities subscription expired on me. I wasn't too thrilled with Norton after Utilities failed to really do anything for me either before or after the hard drive crash I had last spring, but I'd had a lot of experience with Norton in the past and just generally considered thought them to have the best computer security software out there. Of course, as soon as I installed the software I found that it really slowed my system down and it put up all these annoying things on my system and in my Web browser to let me know that Norton was protecting my system (yeah, thanks, I already bought your product so you can turn down the advertising). Then, when I blogged about this and went to get an Amazon.com link to Internet Security 2007 to insert in here, I found out that most other people were having the same experience I had with the software, and that I really should have bought something from McAfee instead. Still, I'd paid for a year of Norton coverage, and I was determined to at least get my money out of that.
Fast forward to around the start of the month. I'm here on my computer minding my own business when Norton suddenly pops up and says I need to register Internet Security 2007 to keep using it. Strange, I think, because I'm pretty sure that I registered it when I first installed it, but I click on the "Register Now" button and trust that this will solve the problem. Instead, however, it then proceeds to say that the one-year subscription I bought back when I got the software this winter had expired, and that now the software wasn't going to do much of anything to protect my system until I buy a new subscription. I know that this isn't right, so I stay on my now-unprotected computer and get on the Web, specifically Norton's Website, to try to figure out what's going on. After going through Norton's Knowledge Base (or whatever they call it), I find out that apparently a lot of people are having this same problem and that the way to fix it is to completely uninstall and then reinstall Norton.
It sounds so simple, but of course between uninstalling it and reinstalling it and then downloading all of the patches to the various components of the software via LiveUpdate, not to mention all of the times I'm forced to restart my computer, I wound up spending an incredibly long time to get my computer back up and operating like it should. Given how critical the software's firewall and anti-virus functions are, this wasn't exactly something I could put off for any period of time. It was bad enough when I had to do this once, but I lost the better portion of the early part of my day here having to go through this whole procedure for the third time this month. I really don't want to think about how much productivity this has cost me here.
Suffice it to say that I consider this current state of affairs completely unacceptable, and I will never buy Norton products again if I can possibly help it. More to the point, though, if this is happening to enough people that Norton has a page on the problem up on their Website, and that they actually think that forcing customers to go through this rigamarole is acceptable (instead of, you know, patching their damn product), then I seriously have to wonder about pursuing some sort of class action lawsuit. I know that there's probably some legal jargon buried deep in the user agreement that Norton can use to avoid getting sued, but for the love of Belldandy, for any piece of software to be this unreliable, particularly something as important as Internet security software, is beyond the realm of reasonable business practices.
Symantec Antivirus by itself is just fine, but the Norton products have, as you said, been bogged down by needless bloat.
I'm not sure the McAfee stuff is going to have any less bloat, but hopefully it'll be more reliable. Failing that, I'd consider getting a combination of Ad-Aware, Windows Defender, and AVG Anti-Virus...
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon