Anonymous Bob said:
I have great respect and appreciation for all the MVP's who so selfishly
share their time and expertise. There's another Microsoft MVP in that thread
who also speaks of Symantec in a derogetory manner. Flankly, I'm a tiny
little bit put off by his/her comments and by your own. FWIW, I have used
Norton/Symantec products for many years and I haven't had an unusual number
of problems with them.
One could easily start a religous war on the topic of Symantec, but those
who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. <bEg>
I understand your position and I congratulate you for being one of those
individuals chosen by the Supreme Divinity to be able to run Symantec
products without problems. I assume you have uninstalled successfully them,
too.
I live in a country in South America and my experience (both personal and
helping others) is that Symantec:
- Provides resource hogs. Apparently they think the machine is for their
tools, instead of having the tools to improve the machine's performance. For
people that like their system tools, I recommend that those aren't set to
load automatically. Those shiny bars and meters want more memory than most
programs I use.
- I was lucky I was able to uninstall, but I had to waste hours digging in
the registry and file system for things that belonged to Symantec
applications. I used the command prompt and PowerDesk (now a vcom product)
to chase files hidden in special directories.
- Several years ago (7, 8, maybe more, don't remember) I purchased Winfax.
It was a source of frustration. Any update was a disaster, with Sym forums
full of people complaining against the same issues for weeks and the inept
tech support staff denying the facts. Finally I found a registry problem and
notified them, but that only showed the next bug: if you had too much free
disk space, Winfax wouldn't work. Notice at that time, the biggest disks
were below 5 GB. Most people lost their right to a 30 day refund or so while
waiting for a solution that Sym didn't care to push.
- I purchased NAV 4 or 5, don't remember. It worked. I was satisfied. I
upgraded year after year. I happened to purchase their new Norton Internet
Security product (aka NIS). Since the firewall was the creation of another
company, it worked fine in the first two versions. Wait until the third
version: it couldn't filter anymore on my machine (it was the same machine),
tech support was clueless, they always tell you to uninstall and reinstall
10 times to make you lose time while they prepare the next scapegoat, the AV
became tied to the FW (before that, I could start the FW on demand so I
could do my heavy compilations with less processes competing for HW
resources), the FW started using a main window based on MS web technology
(the same DLLs that are loaded by IE and Outlook to work with web pages) so
if you disabled several options for security in IE, NIS interface wouldn't
work, etc. I finally switched to Outpost and KAV5, used KAV for a year but
it was too resource hungry and their new 6th version wouldn't run on my
machine because (I suspect) I have some services disabled. Indeed, I
couldn't boot even. Since they didn't show interest in working with me (even
after offering my findings and any tech information they would need) I
didn't pay for the 5->6 upgrade but I changed to NOD32 and I have to say it
makes good partner with Outpost.
- I've seen people that are unable to install any AV or FW after their
uninstall NIS or NAV. I've seen people that turn the antispam feature off
because it's overjealous but it continues running because it still blocks
and/or marks some emails, etc.
- I've seen people that can't get rid of infected files until they disabled
Sym products. And when you submit a suspicious file to Sym, thinking a
technician will have a look as they say in some marketing offering, it's
simply analyzed automatically by their on-site NAV running the newest
signature files.
- In the old times, you could go to their forums and see all threads you
wanted. You could see whether others had the same issues as you. Last time I
visited their support site, I couldn't find any forum therefore I had to
submit a request that was answered directly by some technician that -as
expected- didn't provide any useful insight into the problem. Probably their
old public web-based forums gave them bad publicity as any customer could
see there were hundreds of frustrated people "in the same deep water or mud
as you".
All this doesn't mean I have any interest in defending MS. I'm simply
sharing my problems with Sym as a demonstration that criticism against that
company is not gratuitous insult.
I'm sorry Sym acquired PowerQuest and its star products PartitionMagic and
DriveCopy. I'm sure the support quality dropped immediately and DriveCopy
disappeared in favor of Ghost. It makes me remember when NAI acquired
Cybermedia. BTW, it seems that NAI no longer exists.
C.