Terminally Incoherent

Here is a question: what is the point of using Norton Anti Virus software if every other big virus and worm out there is able do disable it? I’m deadly serious here - every single serious infection I have seen in the last few months has trashed Norton installation on the attacked machine.

Lately this became the #1 reason why users call our helpline. Unless their Norton is totally dead, they just keep chugging along and whine that the machine is slow. Once Norton dies though, that’s a red flag. I never really thought about it much, but today I had another user calling in with this and I had to walk her through a fix. As I was doing this, I realized just how ridiculous I must have sounded.

Your AV is down, so you must be infected. Now you have to download and install another AV to get rid of the virus, so that you can get Norton running again. And then you should probably uninstall that other AV because they are going to clash with each other. What kind of advice is that? No wonder the users think we are fucking with them. This is probably the stupidest thing I have ever heard myself say!

And yet we buy Norton because of the brand name, and reputation. Our users feel reassured when they see a familiar Norton or McAfee icon on the desktop. If you install AVG or Avast on their machine they think they are getting cheated into being stuck with an inferior AV because IT is being cheap and withholding the goods from them…

You just can’t win…

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 1:16 pm and is filed under technology, security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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