Jeff and .NET

Thats pretty crappy programming indeed. My laptop came w/ Norton Antivirus, but after 2 months it wanted me to "renew my subscription" which would frequire forking over some cash. I think its lame that new PCs are being bundled with shareware that expirers after a short period of time. So I insalled that POS and downloaded AVG free edition. The UI isn't the prettiest, but it's not like I'm hanging out in my AV software all day.

That's just one chink in their armor. Their installers are chock-full of bugs that have been around for 7-8 years, ever since they bought Central Point Software (whose installers were pretty bug-free).

The other really BAD noticable installer "feature" is try changing the target install folder to something other than "C:\Program Files\Norton AntiVirus" to what it should be: "C:\Program Files\Symantec\Norton AntiVirus". The install script has a ridiculous character max. on the folder name that prevents this. (Note that installing products under "Program Files" and not under a "Program Files\<companyname>" folder should be considered poor practice in the design of an installer. Microsoft violates this good app. design rule with many of their products as well.)

I could list at least another dozen obvious bugs that their "install whip" simply refuses to fix or is in denial about. Probably the worst is the failure of the install script to properly log all registry changes during install such that the uninstall will properly/correctly remove or change them back upon uninstall. There should be absolutely NO REASON why they've had to produce special uninstallers for their products...most which do nothing but attempt to restore the registry back to "pre-Norton-whatever" state (but CAN NOT POSSIBLY DO SO in a transacted fashion, since they do NOT use the install log to determine what was changed in the registry!). Probably the cause for this mess is their reliance on completely scripted install packages, rather than using an MSI-based install package (in which case, the registry changes would get correctly undone during a transacted uninstall).

It's too bad their products are the best of breed, but just suffer integration & installation problems. At every company I've ever been at, this has always been the greatest weakness: integration, system-testing, documentation, installation tools, and release tools ...i.e., the last 10% of the project, companies just tend to fall over themselves trying to kick the crap out the door! And then, usually assign junior programmers to do the finishing steps. Even though the Symantec products all contain at least one or more device drivers, these kind of bugs in the installers makes me believe they've assigned writing the installers to junior's that have not had any device driver authoring experience...and thus SHOULD NOT be in charge with creating an installer! Most companies that distirbute device drivers don't seem to grasp this lack of domain expertise problem with installers...since authoring installers has always been seen by a lot of software developers a crappy job.

If cars were made this way (e.g., oops! we put the wrong size tires on it!), you'd bet there'd be consumer backlash against it. But us stupid consumers did NOTHING when Symantec turned themselves into a monopoly when they bought Central Point Software, so we now reap what we sowed!

Yeah, this sucks, I had thought my install was borked. NAV 2004 did not do this, I do remember that SourceGear's Vault used to do something similar as well, fortunately they fixed it. Unfortunately, Symantec's not SourceGear and their 'solutions' (http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/5faa3ca6df6f549888256edd0061c0a4/fc096f3adb76b4d388256f08006d038b?OpenDocument&src=bar_sch_nam) are less than ideal.

ummm you shouldnt be using norton anyways...

If your looking for even more information on PC security then I would head over here as they have plenty of stuff on identity theft, antivirus software etc.

Good info and well presented, for more quality free info on pc security related issues have a look here.