Symantec has a change of heart?

Symantec, makers of the Norton security product line, must have lost untold millions of dollars in the past few years as users like me and you replaced our fee security products, like Norton, with free products. It'll be a long time before I pay for a security product again, but Symantec is doing what it can to woo back lost customers and keep existing customers.

Walter S. Mossberg reviews Norton Internet Security 2009 on the All Things Digital web site at the following link:

Mossberg's review of NIS 2009

It appears from his review that Symantec has addressed performance and pricing as well, but it's still far from being a freebie! I assume he is addressing a brand new, and probably not yet available product, so it'll be a long time before this doubting Thomas believes it.

On a related subject, a customer asked me to download and install the newest version of Norton Antivirus for him this week. I did so, dutifully paid the $39.99 fee, which is an ANNUAL fee, and finished a very long and painful installation process. After this was done, and it seemed that I came to a nice clean end of the process, I was informed that the license had expired! I tried everything but could not get past this. I finally found Symantec online chat support and signed in. I was number 52 in the queue of people waiting to chat with an expert. Fortunately I was watching a baseball game on TV so I just kept an eye on the screen from time to time, and when my number came up, I entered a chat room with Suresh something. He/she took the time to understand my problem, and then indicated that he/she could help, and went ahead by taking control of the computer I was working on, worked his/her magic, and got the product going.

This was a HORRIBLE, but typical, and very time-consuming Symantec experience. It's like adding insult to injury after you pay your forty bucks. No thank you.

 

Google Chrome Follow-up

I knew I was jumping into Chrome early. It's only a Beta (test) version after all. As reported earlier, it is quite different as browsers we know go. I had a major issue right from the start. I was willing to try something new, but wanted a comfortable feeling of "well, this isn't so different after all", but I didn't get that. One example is that I wanted to display all of my Bookmarks/Favorites on the left side of the window as one normally does in IE or Firefox, but Chrome can't do that! I posted my desire on a chat forum, thinking I was overlooking something simple, but apparently I wasn't.

See the forum chatter about this

I'm holding off on any more investigating until the first official version comes along. If you want to try Chrome now, and you really have nothing to lose other than your time, you can download it here:

Download Google Chrome