By Christine Frietchen on March 17, 2010 in
In the article, Neil J. Rubenking explains -- in excruciating detail -- what happens when he tries to get help installing Norton AntiVirus 2010 on one of his infected test computers. The software installed flawlessly on 11 of 12 test systems, but wouldn't install at all on the twelfth. Rubenking's big beef is not just that phone tech support couldn't solve his installation problems -- it's that it keep pushing him into using their paid virus removal service, which Norton customer service reps said was necessary before he could even install the software.
If you've read user reviews at Amazon.com on Norton Antivirus 2010 or pretty much any other commercial Internet security software, you'll find about as many one and two-star reviews as four or five-star ratings. And unfortunately, it's par for the course when it comes to boxed security software. In our recent update to our antivirus software report, we found the same hot-and-cold reviews for software from McAfee and Trend Micro as well -- all big names in addition to Norton. And by an overwhelming degree, complaints are about installation and customer service rather than software performance.
There might be some solutions on the horizon. It's hard to imagine customer support getting better anytime soon, so you might consider software that doesn't require a lot of installation in the first place. Cloud computing -- where software mainly or entirely resides on external servers rather than your own computer -- is one possible bright spot. For example, we've found good early reviews for Panda Cloud Antivirus Free Edition, which uses a small number of your system's resources and keeps most of the software on remote servers.
But in Rubenking's article, his problems aren't with Norton's performance (which gets very good ratings); it's with customer service personnel that can't seem to solve the problem, and worse yet, that keep pushing him to pay more for extra help in installing software that he's already purchased. We don't want to say too much more about his excellent column -- if you've got 15 minutes, read it for yourself and try not to pull your hair out.