Why Norton Internet Security is Dead to Me

Posted: October 14, 2009 | Categories: Miscellaneous

I've been a HUGE Norton fan since the beginning of my career. I loved Norton Utilities and have used Norton Antivirus (all of its different flavors) ever since I got on Windows. I have to say though that I'm done with it, just done.  I kept updating my subscription every year, but this last version (2009 I guess) was absolutely horrible. I had to disable so many of its features to be able to use my HP network printer and FireFox was never the same after one of its updates. With FireFox, when I start it up on my desktop, it takes several minutes before it will respond to anything I do. It's not like that on any other machine I use, but only on the one running Norton Internet Security.

Well, my subscription ran out a while ago and the final straw for me was this:

It's telling me I need to renew, but it's giving me a ridiculously limited number of options. Instead of letting me say 'don't bother me again' or 'remind me in a week' - the only options available to me are buy now or remind me tomorrow. I was trying to decide what I wanted to do with this, so I had to fire up Task Manager and kill the task to get it to stop reminding me every day. As soon as I reboot my machine, it starts reminding me again and again and again. Enough already - it's unfair to consumers to be this relentless; all it's doing is making me want to use somebody else's product. Now, I happen to own a 5 pack license for Symantec antivirus, so I'm going to switch to that. If I didn't already have that license, I would likely purchase some other product.

It's too bad they don't think of their customers when they do stuff like this - it's better to be accommodating (which is what I expect) than annoying (which is what I got).

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