Do not buy the next version of Norton antivirus internet protection. Don't even think about it, you will regret it as sure as I'm writing this.
My virus protection was set to expire some time around the first of March, and I was irritated by the fact that my own computer, through its own antivirus program, kept trying to get me to renew early. I figured out what a scam this is. In order to get the message to stop appearing, I'll bet millions of people renew as soon as they start getting the message. The problem is that the company, Norton's parent Symantec, doesn't start the new coverage when the old coverage was set to expire, they start it right then. If you were foolish enough to always renew as soon as it started warning you, you would consistantly get 11 months of coverage for the price of 12. In MBA-speak, that's a 8.3% untapped profit stream. Hell, why not just start reminding people a couple of days after they buy a year's worth of protection? Maybe you'd get some people to buy again right away, over and over.
So I was already not favorably inclined toward Norton, and I let the subscription expire. For around 3 weeks afterwards, I got messages about how the subscription was expired and I wasn't protected against new viruses! I kept ignoring it, and eventually my wife asked me when I was going to do it and offered to do it for me if time and hassle were the only issues. Principle was the only issue, I was tired of dealing with them.
I was still mad at Norton for "upgrading" their product from 2006 to 2007 and taking their anti-spam feature out of their software. The was for my computer at work, and since that time, I've been spending about 15 to 30 minutes a day wading through spam manually and picking out the stuff I can delete.
On a hunch or nasty suspicion, I took that time to finally get a new external hard drive and back up my computer.
Finally, one Sunday morning when my wife was at work, I decided to upgrade my Norton anti-virus program. The new program was called Norton 360, and I already noticed that it was difficult to get the Norton Systems Works as a separate item. I uploaded the program in about an hour and decided to copy some files from another computer to work on. I could not get the files on my pin drive to copy. I tried Windows Explorer and an old program like it called Power Desk, and neither worked. I could open a DOS window and copy the files manually, so it wasn't that the disk was so badly messed up that I couldn't copy anything, it was just that my file utility programs were suddenly not working. Then Internet Explorer started getting sluggish.
I tried to uninstall the Norton program using the uninstall tool, but it wanted to delete my ACT! Database, which I wasn't willing to let it do.
I took it to work the next day and called their help line. They walked me through uninstalling the Norton through Windows and full file manipulation functionality returned. Then we reinstalled the program and the problem was back. That ate up an entire day. The next day, I got online through their online advisor chat system again to start fresh with another young clueless person from Bangledesh. They were using this utility where you give them remote control of your computer and you sit back and watch them make changes, like some kind of magician's trick. I saw what he was doing, and I couldn't imagine it would help. He told it to uninstall, and the computer got hung up for about 30 minutes. So I started moving the mouse around and he came back on and shut the window.
"Is it working now?" I checked, "no, still not working." Norton is uninstalled, and it is still not working, therefore it is not the fault of Norton. I was not convinced that Norton was not installed, so I checked and it was still there. His "uninstall" did not work. I went back to the Internet Explorer window where his chat window was and he was no longer there. Shortly after that, Internet Explorer stopped working. I could not uninstall the Norton manually, it hung up when you got to the point where it was supposed to be removing it.
I found on the internet tons of hits for people that were devastated by trying to install Norton 360.
I had to pay a Computer IT guy $150 to completely reformat my hard drive and reload the computer from scratch. Norton still charged me for the product, even though I emailed them to remove the charges. The IT guy loaded AVG on my computer for free to protect me from viruses. How Norton is going to stay in business after this fiasco is beyond me. I used to think that Norton made the viruses in order to force people to buy their product (conspiracy theory style thinking). Now I wonder if their product isn't the virus. The way they demonstrated their inability to help me and the immediate and dire consequences of their program has led me to believe that they are not smart enough to make a virus.
Now my wife's computer is prompting her to renew her subscription to Norton.
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