Doing My Part
This is what they get for being annoying enough to make me change: Symantec’s first-quarter income falls to $95.2 million.
If they had even provided a minimum of service they would have received my annual subscription fee which was almost total profit. But, no they had to be miserable CPU wasting jerks.
You should never, ever mess with your “cash cow.” They never learned the lesson of “New Coke.” Just like the DLC they assume their base will stay while they make changes to attract new customers. I would like a cite where that strategy has worked. Newspapers and television do the same thing, make changes that will supposedly draw new people, and end up losing old customers.
14 comments
I’ve heard many complaints about the Norton line of products, but I’ve been fortunate that they’ve always functioned quite well on my machines. I’ve been having an “issue” with the virus updates, but I can go to their website and do a manual download. And I believe the problem in updating has been due to registry keys getting added all over the place. I’ve had little problems with CD/DVD drives rendered inaccessible, cameras not wanting to upload and the PDA constantly having its connection not recognized. I am running so many programs on this machine that conflicts are certain to arise.(During a past problem solving session , the Dell tech who had remotely taken control of my computer said, “Wow, you have a lot of programs on this computer!”) Just need to sit down and call Dell to talk me through the process.
CG, I’ve had no end of problems with Symantec-Norton A/V over several years and across several machines. I almost danced for joy when Norton A/V on my laptop notified me a couple of days ago that it expires in a month. Updates have occasionally been a problem. Downloads of pieces of the s/w have failed in ways that were not correctable. One time, I paid an online renewal fee, only to have it refuse me the yearly upgrade. I phoned Symantec about that; they were helpful, but you don’t want to know what I had to do to get that phone number. On my previous desktop machine, performance dropped to about half when I installed the latest Symantic A/V. No kidding: it was like pouring honey from a jar. Forget it.
On my new desktop, which I’ve had for only three months, I’m running NOD32. So far, so good… no infections, the automatic updates are hassle-free, and best of all, there’s no major performance hit. That’s what I plan to purchase for my working laptop, to replace Symantec.
A good friend just gave me a five-year-old laptop to refurb if I can. Thanks to Bryan’s reminder, I’m going to try AVG on it, as a zero-cost A/V solution. There’s a vestige of Symantec/Norton on it, too; that has to go. I’m tired of being taken for granted, stiffed on yearly updates and forced to upgrade every three years. Enough already!
These days, I see no reason to put up with bulky, lethargic software that is difficult to buy, let alone update and maintain. Symantec A/V is history in my shop.
You have to get a special program to remove Norton, uninstall doesn’t work, apparently as a security measure. It was just dogging down the machine when I was trying to compile changes. It was just too slow and intrusive for a software development machine.
As to the DLC, don’t get me started… “DINO” would be more appropriate. Where is Al From, anyway, Mars? Nah… any Martian that could survive on that planet would have to have more common sense.
It is well past the time to end corporate welfare and let them pay a fair share. Why should their income be treated differently than their employees?
All of the moves the DLC wants to make involve core values. You don’t give up core values or degrade them. If they want to start a third party, let them. That hasn’t been outlawed….yet.
Bryan, that five-year-old Sony laptop belonged to a medical professional who may have had sensitive data on the HD. I’m considering wiping the drive and using the restore CDs (which are XP SP1), installing AVG, applying XP SP2 from a CD I have, then doing a Windows Update from the net. If you have a suggestion as to a better order in which to do that, I’d be happy to hear it. If everything works, this may become Stella’s laptop; her current one is from 1997 (yes, you read that right), and performance is really not an issue for her.
“That hasn’t been outlawed….yet.” – Bryan
Bryan, that’s one scary thought I hadn’t had yet, though the notion that the Bushists might jail the current Democratic leadership as “enemy combatants” has occasionally crossed my mind.
But I am from “the Democratic Party wing of the Democratic Party,” as the late great Paul Wellstone put it, and I see no need for the compromises (read: total capitulations on central values issues) that the DLC advocates.
The center-right already has advocates in American government: the old, pre-Bush GOP. The center-left deserves something too, and to hell with anyone who says I am damaging America by demanding that my views… which were regarded as centrist enough 10-20 years ago… have representation in government.
As you said, there is only one Bill Clinton; no one alive today has his gift, and no living Democrat can afford to “triangulate” as he did. If someone tries, it will be, as I recently coined on my blog, “Bermuda triangulation,” and “the Democratic Party wing of the Democratic Party” will vanish beneath the waves. Uh-uh. I’ll fight like hell to prevent that.
Your plan for the machine is what we did with donated machines for the clients of a local service organization. There is no other way you can be sure that everything is removed. The clean install will prevent problems that have been building up over its life and clean up the registry.
You’ll need to check the Sony site for updated drivers, because I’ll bet the install disk still has the originals on it.
As for the DLC, I see no reason to make Ralph Nader’s claim a reality.
Individual candidates will decide for themselves what needed for their area, but I see no reason for the Party to change to accommodate a minority view. Polling has shown for some time that a majority of the American people hold the same views as the Democratic Party on most issues, so there’s is no point in making changes.
“Bermuda Triangulation” indeed, because no one knows what the real effect will be, making it a wild gamble, not a reasoned choice.
I cross-linked this post at BBWW, putting out the call for a better mousetrap.
You can’t just leave me hanging like that, Bryan! What’s the special program needed to get Norton A/V uninstalled? I’m downloading AVG as I type this, I’m that frustrated with the ginormous memory-sucking monster that Norton has become, and its insistence, despite being told not to, on checking the internet every couple of hours to see if there are updates–at which point my computer slows to the veriest trickle. And it seems to do the same whenever I start it up, which of course means that I actually wanted to do something with my computer, and not sit and wait for it to be able to respond to my input again.
Michael, this link should do it. If there’s a problem here’s a list of removers.
Thanks. And I just loved this little snippet at the end of the instructions: “Your computer may be restarted more than once, and you may be asked to repeat some steps after the computer restarts.”
It took me two bleeding hours to get NIS off my computer, and one hard reboot in the middle of that, when the first attempt got hung up somewhere and completely froze the machine–even the damn clock wasn’t advancing! Grrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
The software infects every corner and there’s no other way of getting rid of it than using their software. It’s really annoying.