Folks, I got to tell you that the software industry is not getting better. It is getting worse! Recently, I purchased Symantec’s Norton 360 and it turned into a disaster.
I’ll give some history here. I was travelling and my notebook bombed on me. So I stopped into the local tech shops to purchase a new notebook. Well, I could find one that was bundled with software so I ended up getting a barebones one with 30 to 60 day trail software to get me through my travels.
One of the trail packages was Symantec’s virus checker. On every boot this annoying splash panel popped up alerting me to register and purchase a subscription. There was no way to turn it off other than uninstall it. So I did in order to get my machine to boot more rapidly and stop the annoying popups.
On return I decided that I really do need some protection on the machine when I started getting on the internet. So I made a decision to buy Norton 360 and that is when the real problems began!
First, I could not login to https pages that I had been going to without a problem.
Second, I could not load my bank, American Express, or email websites. I kept getting invalid certificate errors and the login fields simply did not work.
Third, some how my system dates became unstable. In Vista, I had the sidebar calendar and clock loaded since I am on my machine almost nonstop and closely watch the time and date. But after loading Norton 360 some how my date got reset to 5 years earlier. This caused a series of problems. First, my two week old subscription for 366 days is no longer valid.
So I called Symantec tech support. Oh my gosh was that a horrid experience! I got some Middle Eastern guy who spoke English but could not comprehend it. He walked me through the same steps over and over and over and over and over. I kept explaining that my subscription had expired and to activate it in the database but Symantec in thier infinite wisdom designed it not like commonsense. They had me using the cmd prompt and executing command line switches doing this and that to no avail.
I had to end the call because I have a life other than talking to ‘Abu’ in some God foresaken call center somewhere in the Kashmir district. So Abu declares sucess and closes out the trouble call! Then I get an onslaught of emails from Symantec expressing their gratitude for helping me solve thier freaking problem? Then they send me a customer satisfaction survey. Oh boy was hat fun!
Folks, I used the original Norton products when they first came out and never had a problem AT ALL. Those old character based screens and commands saved me many times. Today this CRAP they put out is useless and their websites are annoying mazes that route one to spend more money.
Now I have to battle these jerks for my refund and they probably want me to mail them the product disk at my expense! My investment in their software lemon is way too much already.
I got to travel again and do not have time to mess around with these Symantec duds.
What can be done about this?