Norton starts to give dire warnings it's about to explode because my subscribtion is about to expire so, whith some reluctance and against my better judgement, I update Norton via the web. On completion I reboot as per instructions. Outlook goes south and I can't fire activate Norton. So I phone the helpdesk, some pratt in India asks for my NAME and he can barely speak english. To add salt to the wound he's useless.

This isn't my first run in with Norton. I should have learned the first time.

The whole things leagalised extortion!

Edited September 30, 200619 yr by TooFastTim

norton used to give me mountains of greif so im now using the free programme AVG ......

Although the othet reason there arn't as many viruses that are compatable with mac is because it's so less common than windows, if Macs were more common than Windows it would be a similar situation.

(smug mac ad)

It's all just propaganda you know. There ARE Mac viruses and trojans out there, it's just that (as Felix suggests), they don't get as much publicity due to the relative popularity of the platform and Apple's extremely effective PR people who smother new vulnerability reports with counter-FUD and spin and no software in the world can protect people from themselves (412 scams etc.) or many types of spyware (see here for example). If there's no such thing as a Mac virus, why do most anti-virus companies produce Mac versions of their security suites?

I'm not anti-Mac by any means. Nor am I anti-Windows or anti-anything else for that matter. I just find the whole "platform war" thing incredibly pointless and boring. In the real world, people use whatever operating system and software applications it takes in order to get the job done. I get paid to write .NET applications so I spend most of my time using Windows XP and Visual Studio but there are occasions when I need to glue non-MS systems to my apps using low-level code widgets and for that I usually fire up gcc (via Eclipse) on my Fedora machine. If I have to do web UI design work (which I hate), I frequently use Adobe Illustrator on a Mac, simply because I like the way that it integrates with some of the other image processing utilities on OSX.

For home users it's slightly different of course but in that context it's even more wrong to say that any system is "better" than another. While I'd agree that it's probably true that OSX and Linux are more secure than Windows "out of the box", it's really not that difficult to lock down your XP machine.

OS holy wars are the reason I stopped reading Slashdot

Some people have the odd gripe with Macs too

Clicky HERE

norton used to give me mountains of greif so im now using the free programme AVG ......

Thanks for the heads up Rabie. Norton is now bounced. I await refund from Symantec.

Are you guys remembering that Andy works for the parent company?

Are you guys remembering that Andy works for the parent company?

I do work for Symantec, but that is purely because they acquired the company I did work for (Veritas). I deal with data availability solutions, not the security side of things. If the truth be told, I don't even run Norton myself and never would as I find it an incredible hog on computer resources.

Are you guys remembering that Andy works for the parent company?

I knew that Andy works for Veritas and both are owned by Symantec. Bit like having a deliquant brother I would think.

Hey John, drop us a line. Things are good here.

I find it an incredible hog on computer resources.

thats the killer for me, rather than its actuall ability to do its job