I hate Symantec

[Shalom]

Not having to do with other customers, just a rant about a company that hasn't been the same since Peter Norton left.

Because of the short-sightedness of whoever originally set up the partitions on this machine, way back when, our c: partition is chronically short of space, resulting in a recent failure of our drug database to update itself. So I was poking around add/remove programs, looking for unnecessary stuff that I could ditch.

I discover that Symantec pcAnywhere is installed.

Damn, is that still around? I remember using it in college, back around 1995 or so. I called our software vendor just to make sure that we aren't using it for anything. They say it's not needed, and I can ditch it. In any case, it claims not to have been used since 2004, which is four years before we even acquired this computer.

So I go to uninstall it. Uninstall fails. Why? Because these morons at Symantec saw fit to leave the uninstall file in a subdirectory under %TEMP%. Which gets cleaned out every now and then (see above re: shortage of disk space).

Fine, I can nuke it manually, right? Hit symantec's website, find the instructions.

Holy crap. They want me to manually remove no fewer than 151 freaking registry keys. About a quarter of which are CLSIDs, which are identiified by hex numbers only. No, they didn't give me a convenient .reg file to import either. Had to go through the list by hand nuking them one by one. (Can't even shift-click to get a bunch at once, regedit won't let you for some reason.)

There were quite a few things I'd rather have been spending time on than that, but I got it done. Sheesh. Temp directories are not supposed to be places to store stuff long-term, you idiots.

Ah well. The mantra of Another Place that I used to hang out in was "All Software Sucks". Still, some suck harder than others.

[ender]

I hate Symantec

All I can say is Welcome to the club.

[PepperElf]

dang. at that point, frankly it might be easier to reformat/repartition.

tho that in itself is a lot of work too

[sms001]

Doesn't CrapCleaner parse the registry for things like that?

(And concur on Peter himself; Norton Commander, Guides, heck, just UNErase made him legend.)

[Geek King]

I feel your pain on the mass registry edits. I found out recently that Chrome borks the registry when you have it as primary browser, then uninstall it. I had to check a couple dozen keys to change the values so I could get an exec's PC back with working web browsing.

PS--The No-shift-Click in regedit is a protection. It seems very awkward, but its less awkward than frying multiple entries in a single mis-keystroke.

[protege]

At one point it was pretty good but now it is nothing more than bloatware that blocks stuff when you don't want it to and tends to be a resource hog.

Norton had some good software at one time--efficient, and it did the job. Then Symantec took over...and all of that went to shit. After having too many issues at work, I refuse to use it, and will uninstall it if it comes on a new computer. Why is it, that their software, designed to prevent crashes...actually causes them?

[dalesys]

...Why is it, that their software, designed to prevent crashes...actually causes them?

It'd be a terrible shame if this cute little knick-knack shop of yours should catch fire... or (CRASH! tinkle) be vandalized... you really need some insurance from a fine local enterprise with international connections....

[Silent-Hunter]

I used Norton stuff for 13 years and it was great, but then my MS-DOS 6.22/Windows 3.1 machine broke a few years ago. God I miss that computer.

Does anyone know if UNERASE still exists, and if so, does it suck now?

[Fire_on_High]

This sounds like a job for Crap Cleaner.

[Headset Hellion]

Speaking of Symantec, do you know how many customers I talk to, on a weekly basis, who are royally pissed off about Symantec charges on their credit cards? They process their credit card payments outside of the US...which generates a 3% foreign transaction fee.

[EricKei]

Symantec/Norton is a fairly intrusive program, too >_> short of the Registry cleanup you mentioned, it's one of those progs that doesn't really uninstall itself completely just because you hit "Uninstall" - it leave bits and pieces behind that I have occasionally seen mess with other programs, years later. Their excuse seemed to be that "Hey! Maybe they'll reinstall it later on..." ~_~ AOL was guilty of this, as well.

There was a point in my (former) accounting software tech/installer job where the best thing we could do to get a failed install off the ground was to completely remove anything made by Symantec. It seems that telling NAV to whitelist the installers/program itself, and to temporarily disable all forms of program blocking during the install, was insufficient. Doing those things didn't actually prevent NAV from blocking the installer or executable >_<

[sms001]

During their hay-day, I regularly carried an Anti-Norton bomb in my toolkit. Their 'approved' uninstaller, a reg patch, and a folder/keyword batch file. Kinda sad.

[sld72382]

The newest versions of Norton Antivirus are actually pretty decent according to people. Still, with Norton's track record I'd rather have no antivirus than their software on my machine....

[Racket_Man]

The newest versions of Norton Antivirus are actually pretty decent according to people. Still, with Norton's track record I'd rather have no antivirus than their software on my machine....

Yes and NO. I recently got hit (not sure how) with Suspicious Cloud 7 PE. Norton just kept throwing up alerts (I ended up with like 500 alerts in a 24 hour period) BUT could/would NOT get rid of the offending file (on disk or in memory).

I ran 2 FULL system scans but Norton would/could not find the file or get rid of it.

I finally got MBAM to run and it took one maybe 2 passes to kill off the file.

[EricKei]

Am I wrong for longing wistfully for the days of viruses like Blaster (circa late Y2K, plus or minus a couple years, iirc)? Its operation was so simple to diagnose: If you tried to access the internet in any way, the computer would promptly shut down. We carried Blaster killers on disc/etc at the time, making it an easy fix.

Burners, though, those were a problem. The problem being, by the time it takes effect, you're already screwed. They operated by disabling the hardware throttle on hard drives and, sometimes, optical disk drives. Three guesses what the throttle control does, boys and girls they called them "Burner viruses" for a reason.

I actually did encounter one on a client's computer in person, as it took effect. He literally had bluish smoke issuing forth from his computer case. For better or for worse, he was in the process of shutting his store down at the time, so he was just sans work comp for a few weeks until he shuttered his doors for good (comic shop -- It was too late to do anything by the time I got there, but I was able to get is disconnected before anything else caught fire, iirc, so he gave me some goodies as thanks for helping him out).