[Ben]

Well, you shouldn't need any more reasons not to use Symantec bloatware, but just in case you do...

I updated a copy of Norton Antivirus on an old PC today. If I had enough Sophos licences I'd have switched it over to that, but I don't, so with Norton it stays.

I was prepared for the usual 'Buy this instead! No, buy this! Oi, idiot, BUY THIS MORE EXPENSIVE BLOATWARE THAT YOU DON'T NEED' treatment, I've renewed with Symantec plenty of times before, grudgingly, but unfortunately that was only the beginning of my troubles tonight.

Without my permission, Symantec automatically stored my credit card and address details in an online account. Now I could revel in the joys of one-click ordering Symantec products... oh hurrah. There's no way to remove these details from the online account, and the reason they have captured the details is for this:

Symantec will now automatically renew any product you buy from them. Yep, that's right, until your credit card expires, you're theirs! A little notice stated this, saying that automatic renewal could later be cancelled. Oh, it can be cancelled, can it? How about asking me whether I wanted it in the first place?!

So, anyway, I submitted a form I dug out of the Symantec website requesting that the automatic renewal be cancelled. Then I opened up their 'instant support' chat and unloaded onto a few support agents, who confirmed that the automatic renewals would be cancelled and my billing details would also be removed from my account.

What a waste of time. The money-grabbing good-for-nothing Symantec just get more and more desperate every time!

Never again. I hope you go the way of McAFee!

There are tonnes of other, more serious reasons why many of Symantec's products are crud. Here's one (http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,135770-c,antivirus/article.html).

[miffed]

Blimey ! robbing toerags

Surely this is illiegal ? I should imagine there will be a lot of people that will not realise the significance of will not cancel

My only experience of Symantec is NAV , I had Norton 2001 on my first PC , seemed fine , then I upgraded to 2002 , still fine - From 2003 onwards though ,performance started to get slower & slower and It didn't even cross my mind that it was the AV software - until I heard people advising me to unisntall Norton and replace with AVG - I did this and it was like buying a new PC !
My last flirt was Norton Internet Security 2006 - (my mother in law got two copies with a laptop she bought & gave me one of them )
I put this on my Sony Vaio Laptop - (2.6g celery - 512k ram ) and it all but brought it to a halt ! - the thing was so slow it was virtually unusable
So I uninstalled it and threw the discs away

[Hands0n]

I spend more time than anything else when called upon to perform PC support for friends, family, associates, 3rd parties and anyone else who has heard of me ..... removing Symantec product from their machines. It is, without question, one of the worst bits of intrusionware going.

The real laugh comes when something goes wrong with it and it starts naffing up your PC. No amount of cajoling, uninstalling, reinstalling will make it work. It must do some horrendous things within the registry and probably with hidden files on the hard drive that don't get deleted when you uninstall (because the problem never goes away!). I had one of my old bosses spend more than 3 months trying to get is Norton Internet Security working again after it malfunctioned. Symantec told him to renew his licence which he obediently did - to no avail (I could have told him that if he'd bothered to ask me). Then they got all uninterested when he kept badgering them for the help and support that he'd paid for!

In the end he finally saw reason and listened to me - installed AVG Free and has not looked back since! In fact, for a private individual, there is not a better offering than AVG Free and, if the Snob in you expresses itself you can always pay AVG for one for their more premium products - which have exactly the same Anti-Virus engine and signatures as the free version. Furthermore, I have often seen AVG Free find and destroy virus, trojan and other infections that Symantec and McAfee don't spot!!

I've used AVG Free and their Pro and Server versions for more than three years and in all that time have not had a single virus etc. get through.

Symantec? Pah! A complete waste of time. This (http://free.grisoft.com/doc/5390/us/frt/0) is what you really need.

[Ben]

I'm glad you both agree with the general standard of their software. My AV software of choice used to be Dr. Solomon, back in the days before McAFee bought them out. The software used to come with 'Magic Bullet', a floppy you could insert when the PC was off and boot into for a full disinfection before the OS can load. Happy days.

Sophos is still my fav these days, but buying copies is totally annoying. They make me go through a local reseller who's pretty hard to get hold of. They also just replaced their 90's style interface with an Explorer style one and, quite frankly, the old one was better. Sophos also works on the Mac, but I have never tried it. Until a realistic threat appears it'd just be wasting processor cycles.

AVG Free is awesome, great offering.

[gorilla]

Just to add my 2p. I was amazed when a colleague bought Norton as it was on offer (£25 I think). I tried to explain about AVG and how bad Norton was, but he wasn't convinced. Paid = good; free = bad. It wasn't long before he bought extra ram as his pc suddenly needed it. Tut tut. I always tell people not to bother with paid for services, especially when they are buying from dell etc, who try to force you into purchasing from there. If you need to go down that route there are better alternatives. Me? I just opt for AVG and other free spyware removal tools. At the end of the day, if you have a hardware firewall, don't open suspicious email attachments and surf sensibly, then you should be ok.
Of course if you were that concerned you'd get a mac or install linux!

[Ben]

Despite never having an infected machine that has been sitting behind a properly configured firewall I'm in the camp that believes Antivirus to be essential on Windows. I'm not an Outlook user (mostly) but years ago there were plenty of examples of virus-ridden email attachments being executed from content, such as images, within emails that Outlook wasn't handling properly. You didn't even need to open an attachment! Windows is just too flakey to not have a safety net.

I also believe there are some great business-to-enterprise class solutions out there (Sophos). For the personal-personal-computer, though, you're certainly right in pointing to the mass of free and reliable software out there.

Still, if there were a room full of Antivirus vendors, Norton/Symantec would be the elephant.

[Hands0n]

Still, if there were a room full of Antivirus vendors, Norton/Symantec would be the elephant.

And AVG would be the Eagle, soaring high overhead :) It really is that good - even in the Free version. The Paid-for on Desktop and Server is extraordinary value, and superb quality.