Rob's Rants

For several years Symantec’s Norton products have made my life a living hell. Three years ago I bought my 70 year-old mother a Dell computer to replace her nearly 10 year-old Gateway that was finally too old to run Windows XP. (It actually lives on running Debian Linux in my basement.) The system arrived with the full complement of Dell bloatware, most of which I spent a couple of hours uninstalling. But since she has DSL service, I figured she should have some sort of virus protection, so I left the copy of Norton 360 installed.

Since that fateful moment, every single problem I’ve had to troubleshoot on her computer has been the result of Norton. This is not an exaggeration. My mother lives an hour away from me, so an onsite troubleshooting session is a minimum of two hours of commuting hassle. And Norton has required at least four onsite visits as well as several remote troubleshooting sessions (thank you Team Viewer and the free for personal use policy). The bulk of the problems have come after automatic updates and upgrades. Usually what happens is that the update wouldn’t successfully complete and there would be a constant security warning box that freaked my mother out until I could download an updated version and install it. Other times the problems came at the annual subscription renewal time where my mother could never get the system to take her order and the subscription would run out and the product would flash all kinds of warnings.

But the final straw happened about three weeks ago when another upgrade failed to completely install, and it caused a constant BSOD, which meant I couldn’t remotely troubleshoot it either. So into the car I went, fighting Boston traffic the whole way. Using the Windows Task Manager I confirmed that a Norton process was running when the BSOD happened . So, after the third reboot, I managed to start the task manager fast enough to get in and kill both Norton processes and then verified that the computer would actually stay running, which it did. So I started uninstalling Norton, but as anyone who had tried knows, Norton can’t be uninstalled easily. Using the uninstall option in the Norton program group left enough crap on the system that the upgrade process actually started itself and the incomplete update warning box popped up – after the program was supposed to uninstalled! So I had to download a special uninstall program from the Symantec website, because, well, because why the hell should the uninstall option actually uninstall the program? Fucking hell, Symantec, how do you assholes live with yourselves?

So I am officially done with Symantec – I’ve moved into active boycott mode. I have run Kaspersky antivirus on my own systems since it was a freeware program for Linux and I have had only one technical problem in all those years due to a bad upgrade that they posted which caused a major Windows security conflict. But they published a patch within a few hours. So my mom is now running Kaspersky too.

And I am D-O-N-E done with Symantec and Norton products.

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