Symantec – Overlord of the Computer
I’m a little hot under the collar right now. I stupidly allowed the trial version of Symantec installed on this machine to go ahead and update itself. Bad move, very bad move.
You see, Symantec apparently believes it knows better than I when my machine needs to perform some tasks. Like rebooting. I mean, hey, what’s a little reboot amongst friends anyways?
So this little update, which truthfully I neither want nor need, as I will be installing AVG on this machine shortly, finished installing, then pops up a little window “One or more of your updates requires a reboot. Click okay to proceed.”
No, a reboot is most definitely not okay right now, so I hit the close button on the window, without clicking okay. You figure out where this is going yet?
Yup, my windows start closing. Windows asks me if I want to close this program that’s not responding, so I click “cancel” which does nothing. The program closes, the machine reboots, and my last 15 minutes worth of project specification work vanishes into the ether.
You can bet that later today I’ll be hosting a little exorcism here to remove Symantec and some of the other crappy enterprise-ware off this machine and make it more useful.
Symantec sucks. Hint to you clowns: it’s my machine, not yours. Ask me before rebooting and give me an option to do it later.
2 thoughts on “Symantec – Overlord of the Computer”
My HP laptop came with Norton antivirus on it; when I made the mistake of installing the full Norton utilities package, it got totally confused about when my antivirus subscription was up. Then the utilities package never worked correctly, insisting I had a partitioned disk (I didn’t). I gave up and tried to uninstall it; that requires downloading a hard to find utility off their web site, because Norton more or less is malware; it embeds itself into the OS in ways that the usual Windows procedures to remove software simply do not work.
Usually that’s the kind of thing you get software to PREVENT.
I’ll never allow anything from Symantec on any computer under my control again. They’re evil, evil, evil.
I’ve unfortunatly had to push off my little exorcism, in favor of a major system fix for a friend. But you can bet I’ll be putting something other than Symantec on the friend’s machine.