Goodbye Norton
- Date Stamp:
- 25 October 2005
- #
I have been a Norton/Symantec user since I’ve had an IBM PC. In the early years, I used Norton Utilities. In later years SystemWorks and recently AntiVirus. But no longer.
Today, I uninstalled Norton Antivirus (NAV) 2005.
My virus update subscription was due to expire shortly, and in the past I have found it better value to upgrade the software to the later version, rather than just pay to renew the update subscription.
In my attempt to find the price for an upgrade to Norton Antivirus 2006, the Symantec online store would not accept the part number of my current product – and so began the frustration of an email to the online store with a response “we are not able to assist with this issue at the online store”. Turning to the phone (after spending a long time to actually find a phone number on the Symantec web-site), I was passed from Sales to Customer Service (would call back within 24 hrs) to Sales.
In the end, I turned to the White Pages and found the head office phone number. After speaking to a helpful receptionist, I was speaking to Customer Service after a short wait.
In the end, I found that there is no way to upgrade from NAV 2005 to NAV 2006. It was suggested that this is a Symantec policy world-wide, although NAV 2006 upgrade appears on the US Symantec store. The only option if I wanted to upgrade was the Norton Internet Security 2006 product, which included all sorts of things that I didn’t want. This sort of upsell, the poor service and my reluctance to continue to pay for a product that seems to cause performance issues and regularly break – convinced me to move on.
Thanks to Neil, I’m now a user of NOD32 – strange name, but the product seems good.
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Comments
It’s funny how both of us have persisted with a broken product – some sort of misguided loyalty? I was thinking about this after I had written this post, and I suspect for me it was a trust of the “Norton” brand. Misguided, because Peter Norton no longer has anything to do with the Norton products.
Where I wrote above that I’ve had NAV 2005 “regularly break” – similar to your experience Richard, NAV 2005 would just throw up an error about reinstalling when the PC launched, and then everytime an Office app was loaded. I uninstalled, well I though I did, but to really uninstall I had to go through further steps from the Symantec support site to remove further files. Pretty deceptive that “uninstall” didn’t really uninstall. Finally got it fixed (it subsequently broke again)… when it was broken I was concerned as to whether it was really protecting my machine.
Anyway, all gone now.
I’ve been using Norton Internet Security (on PC) since 2000.
Overall, it’s OK. And it (combined with the hardware firewall in my Netgear router) has kept my PC free of nasties over all that time—but boy there have been some frustrations along the way.
I reckon for the last two years I’ve had to re-install the NIS package about 5 times—for no apparent reason. Getting to the point where you CAN re-install can be a major drama, too—whatever it is that kills the software also seems to kill the installer files, and you have to get the ‘special tool’.
And each re-installation requires that all the patches and definitions be re-downloaded (requiring half a dozen restarts along the way).
Then there’s the fact that the AntiSpam toolbar in Outlook won’t stay where you put it.
And the fact that every re-installation means you have to retrain the spam engine from scratch.
If I hadn’t just received (and taken up) an offer to upgrade to the AntiSpyware edition for $US10 (including 12 months of definition updates) I’d probably be shopping elsewhere by now.
Oh, and there were the two massive HDD corruptions two years ago that required total re-installations of the OS and all apps—and I swear they were caused by Norton CleanSweep, which will NEVER find a place on my PC again.