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Symantec Competing Unfairly Against Spybot? 243

Posted by CowboyNeal from the moving-to-secure-income dept.
frankbaird writes "Symantec has been claiming for months that the anti-spyware program Spybot-Search & Destroy corrupts Norton Ghost images. Spybot has tried to convince them this is a false positive. After having been ignored, and this is the second time Symantec has claimed a false positive against Spybot, the makers of Spybot have gone public. They claim that rather than compete fairly with quality products, Symantec is resorting to libel."
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Symantec Competing Unfairly Against Spybot? More

Symantec Competing Unfairly Against Spybot?

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  • If symantec was not the biggest antivirus (or virus) making company, they would not have done such a thing.

    • or clever marketing. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:54AM (#14470950)
      Another instance of market dominance

      Or an example of really clever free press.

      I can't help but think that no matter which way this goes, Spybot is the one clearly coming out ahead; they'll loose some enterprise business if they really are corrupting Ghost images, but otherwise, a lot of people will hear about 'em. If Symantec was engaged in libel, then there is a whole David vs. Golliath thing going on. If Spybot was making up the whole thing, everyone grumbles a bit, but a lot of people checked out their website and/or decided to give the software a try.

      All of which will make proving damages in court rather...interesting :-)

      • True enough, but one thing to consider is that antivirus makers did not care about most spyware for a long time, thus the anti-spyware companies sprung up. Now the anti-virus makers are trying to get into that market too, but their products are still not as good, so there is definitely a motive atleast.

  • Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by murderlegendre ( 776042 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:38AM (#14470882)

    Symantec asserts that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images - well, is it, or isn't it?

    I mean, this isn't like determining the existence of god is it? The image is either corrupt, or it is not. So which is it?

    Anyone?

    • Re:Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:47AM (#14470922)
      This couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the newer versions of Ghost (post-2003, iirc) are complete and utter crap and don't work properly, could it? I believe they repackaged a program called Drive Image as Ghost 9 and that it has absolutely nothing to do with prior versions of Ghost.
      • Yes, In fact even symantec knows its complete crap, they include the cd to ghost 2003 (the last known good version) inside the boxes for ghost 9 and ghost 10! AHAHAHAHAHH

        Have you ever known any company to include the cds of previous versions inside the next version box?

        • Try Acronis. (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 )
          My experience with the newest version of Acronis is that it is far better than Ghost.

          Acronis is not perfect, but much less stupid than Symantec, in my experience.
    • It would explain why my backup of gho images are now giving compression errors.

      Such a shame too, ghost took all the despair out of installing windows. (FWIW a netinstall from local server is still quicker than windows install off CD).
    • Indeed, I am sure that they could have atleast published the findings that lead to the orginal assessment, however incomplete, as defence if there was any reason.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DingerX ( 847589 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:52AM (#14470942) Journal
      "Corrupt" is perhaps not the right word. Imperfect. For all images and vestiges of God are imperfect with respect to the divine exemplar. One can reason back from the image to get some idea of God, but never the full thing.

      I'm sorry, what was the question?

      Oh yeah, well, TFA claims that there's no evidence whatsoever that it corrupts Norton Ghost images, and that Symantec has refused to provide any. So maybe it is like determining the existence of God: it could be the case that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images, but until someone posts some evidence, you'll have to take that on faith from Symantec.

      • Now that's some insight..

        Well put.

      • Re:Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:4, Funny)

        by ettlz ( 639203 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:29AM (#14471073) Journal
        So maybe it is like determining the existence of God: it could be the case that SpyBot is corrupting Norton Ghost images, but until someone posts some evidence, you'll have to take that on faith from Symantec.

        Well, in that case:

        "I refuse to proof that Spybot Search & Destroy corrupts Ghost images," says Symantec. "For proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing."

        Now, something should happen in between, but the desired outcome is nevertheless:

        "Oh, dear," says Symantec, "I hadn't thought of that," and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic.
      • Symantec AV products are, by far, the AV product most targeted by hackers. To me, it's absolutely crazy to use it! Now for that matter, Windows is the most used OS....hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm Got Linux?

    • Re:Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by quark101 ( 865412 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:56AM (#14470958)
      I routinely pull computer images (Ghost 8.0 Corporate Suite), but that I've seen, there has never been a problem with spybot corrupting the image files. Of the several hundred gigs of images that we have stored, only one has ever gotten corrupted, that I can recall. That one image was of a computer that was most certainly not running Spybot though.

      • Re:Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Deathlizard ( 115856 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:52AM (#14471156) Homepage Journal
        Same here. Our ghost server at one time had spybot running with full immunity protection on it and we never had a problem. Also images with spybot in them ran ok once imaged. The only thing I could think of that symantec would be taking about is teatimer doing something wierd to block the ghost server from writing to the drive correctly, and that's a real long shot considering that teatimer needs user verification for just about everything it does.

        This situation doesn't surprise me comming from Symantec however. I ditched them around NAV 2001 and never looked back, Especially when you could predict when the next antivirus version would come out because the previous version would "mysteriously" start having problems or crashing about a week before the next version release.

        • Re:Well then, is it or isn't it? (Score:5, Informative)

          by _KiTA_ ( 241027 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @01:00PM (#14471393) Homepage
          This situation doesn't surprise me comming from Symantec however. I ditched them around NAV 2001 and never looked back, Especially when you could predict when the next antivirus version would come out because the previous version would "mysteriously" start having problems or crashing about a week before the next version release.


          Nor I. I work in a small ISP's callcenter, with aorund 5 other people. Norton products are the bane of my goddamned existance. Half the time you have to disable outgoing email scanning or you just cannot send email, period. Timeout errors all the time. Not only that, try explaining to a customer that it's not your service that is down, but rather, their $200 antivirus program that isn't working properly. Not pretty.

          If Norton Internet Security suspects that "something's funny" it will randomly turn off your connection. You can ping from DOS, but you can't surf via IP or Domain Names. The solution? First try turning off the Norton Firewall, if that doesn't work, try uninstalling Norton. Reinstalling TCP/IP or Winsock doesn't even help.

          I really cannot tell you how many times I've gotten a random "it doesn't work" call, only to find out that they have Norton and it's causing problems. It's my first question now when someone is having oddball problems with email or DNS errors. "Ah, I see. Do you have Norton on your system by any chance?"

          It is important to note that the problems only started in 2003, previous versions of Norton products were fine. In addition Symantec has posted a security warning About their own products. [nbr.co.nz] Seems the latest version of their product uses the same trick that Sony's rootkit used.

          Oh, and did I also mention that NIS destroys Secure website access [symantec.com] even after uninstalling it, unless you fix it by digging through it's options?

          If you want a good antivirus, I suggest AVG or Avast. Both are excellent free products that are nowhere near as invasive as Norton.
          • If you want a good antivirus, I suggest AVG or Avast. Both are excellent free products that are nowhere near as invasive as Norton.

            However, I'm not sure if there are other products more suitable for corporate use. But maybe these have special "editions" for that too. I'm talking mostly about server centralized immunizing features. But I agree with Norton/Symantec having poor security products. The defaults in.. get this... Symantec's anti virus tool blocked VNC and Remote Desktop connections for me once. Fo
            • OTOH by default Avast will scan *every* file that's opened, not just executable ones. Try running a decent size compile with that enabled... If you want your machine back you have to disable that (I just have scan on write plus the standard scan executables/boot sector stuff).

            • The company I work for uses AVG Network Edtion for one of our clients. I dont have any direct experience with it since I'm not assigned to that client, but I'm told it works quite well.
          • Half the time you have to disable outgoing email scanning or you just cannot send email, period.

            You remind me of a nightmare situation ... I installed a SMTP server at the corp's perimeter without issue, only to find certain users (including the CEO of course) were getting "relay denied" errors. It took me weeks to figure out that it was one of these crappy AV programs working as a transparent proxy on the client side, one that was unable to speak SSL/TLS.

            The major problem was that the software confuse

          • I too work in a call center, but our policy is simple. We don't support 3rd party apps which includes norton :). Our solution is to have customers uninstall that software or call norton support for help.
      • Ditto. I use both Ghost 8 and Acronis True Image all the time on machines with Spybot and I've never had any issues. Either the problem doesn't exist, or Symantec seriously messed something up in more recent versions of Ghost.
        • I'll throw my agreement in here. Tried ghost on a video editing machine at work, and it was contantly blue-screening XP with whatever it installed in the background. As soon as ghost was removed, the problem stopped.

          I've since also moved to Acronis and been very happy with the results.

          No more Symantec software on any of my machines.
      • Even there was something that caused machines running spybot to currupt images, how do we know that Spybot is actually the cause? Maybe the bug is in Ghost. Giving Symantec the benefit of the doubt, the better solution would have been for them to get in touch with the makers of spybot and give them some information about what's going on. This just seems like they're throwing a tantrum like an angry 8 year old.
    • Perhaps Symantec tried using their own ghost explorer to browse images, got as far as seeing the S&D folder under program files then ghost explorer crashed. This naturally led them to the conclusion that Spybot had corrupted their images and not the fact that their ghost explorer application is crap and will randomly crash when browsing images or extracting files.

      I remember when I was trying to pull a PST file from a very old desktop image of a user's PC about 2 PC's ago (I keep an archive on DVD of o

    • Get with the program!

      We have a "faith-based" government now - so Symantec has to follow suit. They obviously believe the Bush staffer that said people who live in reality aren't the real movers and shakers of the world. You can only "move and shake" (or is that "shake and bake"?) if you lie well.

      Look at these authors Leroy and Frey - fraud sells, baby! Fraud sells!

      Look at Brangelina! For a year there was no relationship, and now she's pregnant! That's REAL "shake and bake!"

  • but...but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:40AM (#14470890)
    But...But...But Symantec is part of the Anti-Spyware Coalition. [slashdot.org] They would never lie about something like this...

  • Oh, this is funny (Score:3, Funny)

    by Nejaa ( 698892 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:54AM (#14470945)
    Symantic's Norton and Spybot being considerd competitors is quite a streach in my opinion. Spybot was "country before country was cool" in the anti-spyware arena. The Symantic folk have an uphill battle convincing many folk (like me) that current versions of Norton bloatware are not a plague upon RAM, CPU cycles, network communication, and Winblows in general.

  • Sbybot rocks and Symantec are whiney boys (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ayelvington ( 718605 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @10:57AM (#14470959) Journal
    One of the first things I do for any system in distress is REMOVE Symantec. Of course, it's a pain since they are like a plague. They infest the registry like lice and do not remove themselves when you run their deinstallation tool. Bottom line, they are big, but they hogs.

    Sysmantec can whine, but no one who knows anything is listening or buying.

    I donate to Spybot and promote McAfee.

    ay
    • Heh.. so change the fortunes.. McAfee were known as the bad guys a long time.

      But yes.. uninstalling Symantec anti-virus is a good first step for making a Windows PC work reasonably fast and stable. The ammount of troubles through years with anti-virus products has likely been more then viruses themselves, and Symantec definitely tops the list today in unusability.

    • Is everyone here talking about the same product?

      I use SAV Enterprise at work and it seems to me unintrusive and easy enough to handle. Norton AV, OTOH, despite coming from the same company, is a totally different animal - it seems they interpret "Home Market" product to mean "Must interrupt the user at least every 30 seconds to demonstrate it's doing something".
    • It's probably worth mentioning at this point that there's McAfee and there's McAfee - I was a (happy) customer of the home version until a forced "upgrade" to version 8 (I'd only tried to renew the DAT download licence). McAfee 8 is reliant on IE (as was the home version of Norton last time I looked) and doesn't work if IE is configured in a way that I'd consider remotely secure. I was also unimpressed with the way that it tried to replace MS' security centre and impose its own, claiming that I was "unpro

  • Ghost, AV 10 and Spybot play well together (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jd142 ( 129673 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:01AM (#14470978) Homepage
    We've been deploying images with Ghost 8, AV 8, 9, and now 10 with SpyBot for at least a year and a half now and have never had any problems.

    I know, I know, anecdotal evidence and all that, but still we've never had a corrupt ghost image in all that time.

  • Is the message 'Dont use Spybot'? (Score:5, Funny)

    by kestasjk ( 933987 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:03AM (#14470984) Homepage
    Are Symantec trying to tell us 'Dont use Spybot' or 'Use dd instead of Ghost'?.. Out of Ghost and Spybot I know which I consider more disposeable.

  • emailed Guido... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by HyperHyper ( 519220 )
    Well I emailed Mr. Guido Sanchidrian and asked him to validate the truth about the article. His email is in the article and I'm sure his mailbox will fill up over the weekend. :)

    Haven't had the chance to test this issue yet but it sounds highly unlikely that a scan would corrupt a file. I've gave up on Symantec a couple of years ago and have been using alternatives such as AVG and Mcafee. As such, I still find that 2-3 products run in conjunction work best. Speaking of issues, there is one nagging issue
  • I had no issues in 2005 with my system at work, using AVG.

    This year we are using Semantic and daily I run other programs to remove the spyware and virus'es that get through semantic. And daily I remove spyware that is taged as possible virus by adaware.

    I do this when I notice my system getting clunky and always when I do a windows update (as there is always spyware added to any MS update, especially security updates)

    So who is the "security" really for? Obviously its not for me or the company I world for.

    MS
    • I do this when I notice my system getting clunky and always when I do a windows update (as there is always spyware added to any MS update, especially security updates)

      Uhhh.. Do you have any evidence of this? My computer doesn't become "clunky" when I download updates for Windows. If MS was implanting supposed spyware with its updates I'm sure everyone would have been discussing it on Slashdot by now.

    • I'm going to go out on a limb here and say your statements about Microsoft installing spyware with Windows update are just patently false. If you're really seeing what you describe, you haven't done a good enough job of cleaning spyware from Internet Explorer before you run Windows Update. Try using Spybot S&D in addition to Adaware, and be sure to use all of the immunization features.
    • "...and always when I do a windows update (as there is always spyware added to any MS update, especially security updates)"

      You are mistaken. Cosider looking for something that has slipped through your cleaning apps. Try running another clearner, like AdAware, to suplement the detection capabilities of SpyBot. Update and rerun your AV.

      Point being, MS is not infecting your machine via updates, you must have something else.

  • Symantec is extremely adversarial, in my opinion. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:34AM (#14471093) Homepage
    In my opinion, anyone who has been attentive to the computer industry in the last 8 years has seen plenty of evidence that Symantec is to be avoided. Such a person would have seen the amazing number of serious bug reports. Often Symantec is even worse than Microsoft in attentiveness, and that is extreme.

    We stopped using Symantec software, other than to buy copies and test them, many years ago when a Symantec technical support representative cheerfully explained that the very misleading operating system error message we were getting was due to Symantec software being corrrupted by another program. The other program? Symantec WinFax Pro.

    In recent years, Symantec technical support has been very angry and adversarial. It is not difficult to guess that things are not going well inside the company.

    My experience is that Symantec has a high percentage of employees who know almost nothing about technical things. Such employees are cheaper to hire; I imagine that is the reason.

  • Ghost 8 vs Ghost 9 (Score:5, Informative)

    by BushCheney08 ( 917605 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:35AM (#14471098)
    It's interesting that the few posts here that say they've had no problems with Ghost/Spybot have been using Ghost 8. As I mentioned in another post, Ghost 9 and 10 are repackaged versions of Drive Image, which were obtained from PowerQuest. They have nothing to do with prior versions of Ghost except for the name. Does anyone here have any experience with Ghost 9 or 10 and Spybot?

  • symantic sucks, but is mcafee better (Score:3, Informative)

    by cinnamon colbert ( 732724 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @11:43AM (#14471122) Journal
    Based on my experinece, symantec is certainly a resource hog (scanning outgoing email with pdf takes FOOOOOrever), and each edition has a less clear interface, but is macafee any better ? the new dells at work come with macafee, and I cant even figure out how to update the stupid thing - why do people on /. claim it is better ?

    These programs are also a significant cost, which suggests, finally, a way for linux to gain market share on the desktop: tell people about the 5 yr tco of anti spy ware.
    • Yes it is, because it actually works as an AV program, something Norton hasn't done in a while. I am a tech in a white box store who spends 80% of his time removing crapware from boxes. I have had to remove more virus contamination from boxes with Norton than from all the rest put together, including unprotected ones in the last year. In the last 2 months I have removed Norton from over 30 machines because of the virii written last year that break it.

      Yes McAfee has a huge overhead but at least it works. I s
  • The first thing I do whenever I get a new PC or a new client is remove the Symantec GARBAGE from it. The only thing that the company puts out that is remotely useful is Ghost, and even thay had to buy someone out to do it right. Pathetic claims, and even more pathetic business practices. Spybot works well for what it does and the PRICE can't be beat. Anyone that charges money for this sort of thing doesn't deserve any business, unless they can guarantee 90%+ protection. Since no one can do that, no one shou

    • Re:What a joke (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Itanshi ( 861931 )
      garbage indeed, check this. I uninstalled it, but macafee (also removed, deleted etc) was still bugging me so i checked msconfig yet again. well then. Macafee was hidden within that rootkitted hidden norton recycler folder and was still running, well both programs and that hidden folder are now gone (showing hidden files/folders did not show it up, i had to type it in. Regedit to remove the recycler folder i presume, so far i just removed what was in it. yes norton uninstall DID NOT remove that folder)

  • Better Replacement Product (Score:4, Informative)

    by jack_csk ( 644290 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:03PM (#14471188)
    I tell you what, remove your Symantec Ghost and use a better and free (as in beer and speech) product called QtParted [sourceforge.net].

    • Re:Better Replacement Product (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 14, 2006 @12:14PM (#14471221)
      Huh? QTparted and Ghost don't even do the same thing. Maybe you were thinking of partimage (which doesn't let you clone hard drives directly, or clone to larger hard drives). Maybe you were thinking of g4u, which can't backup to cd/dvd. Maybe you were thinking of just slagging Ghost, which is actually a decent product, despite being sold by Symantec.
    • Can you use QtParted to multicast a system image to 5000 machines? To 1 machine? Nope. Then it's not a replacement at all, is it?
      • "Can you use QtParted to multicast a system image to 5000 machines? To 1 machine? Nope. Then it's not a replacement at all, is it?"

        Speaking of a replacement for Norton Ghost, I found this http://freshmeat.net/projects/g4l/ [freshmeat.net] called "Ghost for Linux", which looks interesting.

        Not sure why they call it "..For Linux", as it seems it simply uses a bootable linux CD image, rather than running inside a linux OS install.

        Haven't tried it yet, has anyone had any experiences with it? It looks like it has the ability to
      • No, but Windows would be happy to do that for you with PXE.

  • I work in a computer store and service center as a technician, and it hurts me every time I have to tell a customer that Norton is their best option. McAfee, Norton's only real competitor, makes Norton look positively well-designed and bug-free. When Comcast started giving out McAfee SecurityCenter for free with service we saw a steady flood of computers coming in that had experienced extreme registry damage to the point of requiring a wipe and reload just from the McAfee install. Norton merely breaks Inter

    • Re:Norton, regrettably the best (Score:5, Informative)

      by cgenman ( 325138 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @01:34PM (#14471556) Homepage
      You are kidding, right? It has been years since Norton Utilities did anything useful. The AV scanner and firewall let far too much through, and everything else they install is useless... The spyware scanner is a sieve used as an umbrella, the system cleanup utilities was useful on 98 but now just call software that comes with XP, crash protection takes a ton of resources and never works when you need it to, uninstall is about as successful as the regular windows uninstall routines, etc.

      The only really good utilities are premium and expensive anyway, Partition Magic and Ghost. The average user will never need these, which is fortunate as the average user never buys these.

      For Antivirus, use AVG [grisoft.com]. It is solid, low-resource, and free, and people have been using it successfully for many, many years. For a firewall, you want either Kerio Personal Firewall [kerio.com] or Zone Alarm [zonelabs.com]. Either is a small, robust, and far more secure than Norton firewall. Kerio is a little more powerful, Zone Alarm is a little simpler. Both are free, and have been around for years.

      No antispyware software (especially commercial applications) catches everything, so a cocktail is usually in order. The two I recommend are Ad-Aware [lavasoftusa.com] and Spybot [safer-networking.org]. They're both classics, they both take low resources and are easy to schedule, and they have different search methodologies and as such catch different types of spyware. They also don't run unless called, so they don't take up any system resources. Combined, the two catch just about everything.

      I have heard good things about Counter-Spy, but with just an 85% catch rate, it is still good to run a second application along with it. Likewise, with a 20 dollar yearly service fee, it isn't "fire and forget," and I've seen far too many systems that were unprotected because the credit card on file with their software service company expired.

      Take all of the above utilities. Put them on a disk. Write a very small shell script that automatically launches the installers on insertion of the disk and clicks through everything (try PTFB [pcworld.com], which can be launched and run from the disk automatically) and adds scheduled tasks to run the software. This shouldn't take you too long. Then whenever a crapflooded machine comes into your office with an expired copy of Norton, just clean it up and pop in the disk. I can't tell you how many machines I've installed AVG, Kerio, Ad-aware, Spybot (or some variant thereof) on, and have never regretted it.

      There is a lot better stuff out there. Surprisingly, a lot of it is free. And while people seem to like to pay for software because it gives them a false sense of security, they also like the fact that you can whip out a disk right there and be done in five minutes, hassle-free.

    • Give him a break - if he works in a computer store chances are he could only recommend the home versions of McAfee or Norton, since that's probably all the shop stocks, and it might be career-limiting to suggest anything else. I haven't seen boxed product for anything else for ages.

  • I have never used Ghost, so I can't speak to this particular case, but I have some expertise in the more general case. Exchange 2000 and 2003 shipped with an interesting feature: a virtualized file system that pointed into the store. (Think WinFS or the BeOS file system backwards, if you will. Instead of exposing a hierarchical file system as a set of tables, it exposed a set of tables as a file system.) It was a cool feature, making possible some awesome speed hacks, so they exposed it to users as the
    • I have been seeing general file corruption as a result of NAV. Leave it scanning the database directory long enough and eventually zero data will be written to a page instead of what the system really wanted to write. Add the database directory to the exclusion list and all is OK. At one point we even had a machine bluescreening in the NAV dll simply as a result of copying a file it didn't like onto the server. Yummy!
  • I wont' trust any product with the name Norton on it any longer. Their firewall is nothing short of annoying (even to my non-techie mother,) the fact you have to pay for updates to your virus definitions bugged me so much I went back to AVG (which seems to do a better job of picking up stuff and eradicating it,) and Norton systemworks almost always killed my machine.

    So, I think from my personal experience, that Symantec is indeed being libelous. I've had so many problems, even with the old DOS Norton Uti
  • If you got a free trial, and it expires (AND STARTS ENDLESSLY BITCHING AT YOU), you can set your system clock back to before the expiration, run Live Update, ignore the error messages, and everything will get updated anyway.

    Pretty lame for a 'security' company.

  • I am *Shocked* (Score:4, Funny)

    by drew ( 2081 ) on Saturday January 14, 2006 @01:21PM (#14471502) Homepage
    I must say, I am shocked, shocked to hear that Symantec might have said something untrue in order to promote their product or malign a competing product. Clearly they have always shown in the past that they hold themselves to the highest of ideals.
  • One of the better ways of reducing the functionality and destabilizing a Windows computer is by installing Symantec software on it. The 'Internet Security' suite is a good example, which has cost me several dozens of hours of my life trying to help my parents to get rid of problems caused directly by it. When this did not turn out to be possible I tried to get rid of all Symantec products alltogether. A simple uninstall will not do for that, noooo.... You have to manually scourge the registry from everythin

  • Wonderful Norton (Score:2, Interesting)

    by fireheadca ( 853580 )
    Norton used to be great. Remember those days? I am computer consultant for small and medium sized businesses and each time I see norton installed I suggest my clients to use an alternative. One client recently exclaimed "After I installed Norton, I ended dealing with Norton this, Norton that, I just want my computer to work." If Norton has an issue with a third party app, perhaps they should patch their software.
  • Every single thread regarding anything to do with Symantec is flooded with complaints about how bad Symantec products are. That's fine, I respect that opinion.

    But what the hell do these complaints actually have to do with the topic at hand? Doesn't it distract from the actual complaint ("Spybot being accused of corrupting Ghost images" instead of "Ghost is crap, and so is NAV, NIS, and any other program with the words Norton and Symantec")?

    Good grief.

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