Norton Security Products

I have Norton Internet Security, Norton Anti-Virus and whatever came in the package I bought. I activated the auto update feature and life was good.

Last week a weird thing happened - I received a notice of an update. I never had this occur, it just happened in the past. This one required that I restart my computer. That should have been a big ole red flag.

I downloaded the update it installed and the computer relaunched itself.

As I am prone to do I opened Internet Explorer and Outlook. Both had errors reaching the internet. Hmm.

I rebooted the machine again and soon Explorer was working - not Outlook. For a few days I put up with this and used an internet tool to read my email. See my post from a few days ago on inertia to understand why I did this. One morning I finally decided to call Norton and figure out the issue.

Finding a phone number to call Norton proved to be an ordeal in itself. Internet companies have come to learn that if they post a number everyone will call so they bury it if they put it on a website at all. I finally located a number and called in. I then put up with the assanine system where you choose this or that option - none of which seem to deal with the issue you are calling for. Eventually I just started hitting numbers and finally got a real person.

This persons name was Mark, not! I had reached an Indian call center and having dealt with Indian outsourcing I can assure you that not one of them has an anglicized name like Mark. Mark asks me my problem and says that I should try deactivating the program and then reactivating which has solved this issue previously. Apparently their database on issues is pretty good as he was quick with this bit - or it is a major issue they should look into.

This failed to make a difference. Next we disabled the Internet security app and suddenly email worked. Mark said the issue was clearly with Norton and that he would send me an email detailing what to do to fix it. Great.

I get my email from Mark and it says that I should call their Service Representatives....What was Mark?

My computer still isn't working - I disable the Internet security every time I open email and then shut down email when it is done so I don't get the error as security kicks back in after 5 minutes or so. Inertia.

Now I have received a notice that I am not protected from some devastating problem and I need to be!!!!! or so they say. The auto update runs and doesn't work. It says I should manually run it - huh, if it doesn't work what does manual change?

I try to run it and get a message saying it is running in the background already and I have to wait for it to finish. I get this for about an hour before I decide to launch this application and see if I can shut the process down. Long story short - it is still running and now my Norton is completely screwed up. I don't know if it is all running or just parts of it. The internet part is still running as email still doesn't work correctly.

I guess I am going to have to bite the bullet and make another call to Norton. I wish there were a way for me to contact the Chairman of the company and have him (guessing at the sex but how many are female? Hint, you don't need your toes to count them and you should require a lot more then that) call the help desk and resolve my problem. Then he could understand my frustration and take some real action to correct it. Meanwhile I am left with a new computer that doesn't work properly and is likely wide open to attack by hackers - go for it folks, break in and steal everything. Screaming at Mark or some other poor hack who is paid peanuts to use some psuedonym isn't going to help me.