Geek On The Mountain

I’ve been in need of a new virus scanner for a while now. I have previous used Norton Antivirus, and it has always done well for me so I figured I’d stick with it. I decided to wait until 2005 came out before I went out and got a copy. It came out a couple of weeks ago and that’s just what I did. It turns out that was a bad idea.

It installed easily enough. It was a little bit slow as I would notice later on as I installed it over and over again, but to just do it once wasn’t too painful. Annoyingly the computer has to be restarted when it’s done, but that’s to be expected for a virus scanner (though certainly not wanted). After installation, it wants you to activate the program (just like windows xp and office xp). I couldn’t actually communicate with their server, but I was able to get the sequence of characters I needed through my web browser. I put it in, and it told me I was good to go and thanks for choosing them or whatnot. Great. I then went to the main NAV screen to see what I could do. Nothing apparently. My trial period had expired and I needed to activate. Ok, so I go ahead and activate again, and again I need to activate. After about 10 hours of this loop, I decided something was wrong. Not only was it not activating, but I was also supposed to be able to put off doing so for 15 days, but I didn’t even get 15 seconds. On top of this, liveupdate (program that automatically gets updates) gets an error as well and won’t download certain updates (such as virus sigs…)

I went to Symantec’s website in search of answers. I didn’t find much. They have a searchable knowledgebase, but if you want actual “normal” tech support, you have to pay for it (so they say). There’s no indication of any help beyond what they have online. Fortunately for me, there’s nothing in the knowledgebase about not being able to activate in the way that I can’t. Most of what I found was basically an instruction manual. There was an entry regarding the error I get in liveupdate that said a file was missing (or the registry entry that points to said file), but that wasn’t the case for me. All of their articles are also written to the tune of if this doesn’t fix it than we don’t know. That is to say, they don’t offer any further insight if what they say doesn’t fix it. The only thing I do get a vibe about is that possibly the problem is being cased by an old version of NAV that wasn’t uninstalled. Although I did run both 2002 and 2003, they were both uninstalled.

I’m grasping at straws at this point. It seems as though Symantec doesn’t really support NAV at all. I find out that there are contact email addresses for other issues, including subscriptions. I figure that since it won’t let me use the program at all my subscription must be no good (I said I was grasping at straws here) so I went ahead and emailed them. This person was good enough to forward my email to their actual tech support department, and they didn’t even ask me for a credit card first. I thought great, now I’m getting somewhere.

Wrong.

Tech support emails me the next day and asks for details about the problem. I give them all kinds of details including some screenshots and including that I had already found the knowledgebase entry on the missing file/registry entry and that wasn’t my problem as far as the liveupdate error was concerned. Within 30 minutes of my sending my reply, they responded back saying that the liveupdate error can be caused by a missing file/registry entry…no mention of the other problem (you know, the one that makes all of NAV not work at all). I responded in a lightly scathing manner and made the wild accusation that they had not even bothered to read my email. Given that they were so quick to respond, it may have been some sort of an auto-responder that saw mention of the error and then automatically sent out that response, but if that’s the case then obviously that’s a dumb idea. It’s either that or someone not particularly bright actually read what I had written (or read up until the point where I mentioned the error and then stopped. The funny thing is that I wrote back to them at about 1:45 and they never got back to me the rest of the day. If I don’t hear something intelligible today, I’m sending it back.

So to recap the features of NAV 2005, it seems to do nothing but occasionally pop up warnings to activate. This doesn’t seem particularly useful.

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