Symantec Sued Over AV Auto-Renewals

[Guest]

Who uses this resource hogging crap? I dumped my av and firewall years ago. Virii and hacks are ancient history. Malware is the main threat and there are plenty of removal tools and tips for any problem incurred.

An occasional scan by Malwarebytes and any of several free spyware apps is all you need.

I have five kids and they all know how to avoid these things and what not to click on and I only occasionally have to clean up something.

I say trash the AV use windows protection if it makes you feel better but my experience is common sense works better then any norton or Mcafee piece of crap

 

[mayne92]

I love those auto-renewals that require you to "call" in which all they do is lower the price in an attempt for you to stay with them...

A phone rep for Identity guard brought the price down from $15, to $10, to $5.99, to $5....and so on until he goes "one dollar man!"...funny thing is...if the service was legit...why lower the price almost 90%?

 

[Guest]

@ cekasone: seriously....you sell people that garbage? You should list where you are located so we can get the word out to people to avoid your shop like the plague. Calling yourself a "tech" is an insult to those of us who actually are techs. Norton deserves the classification of "infectious and malignant software" instead of Antivirus. Any self-respecting tech knows that the removal of Norton, or McAfee, or even Kaspersky drastically increases the performance of a PC regardless of the Windows OS installed, and programs like Avast, which are free are much less CPU and memory intensive and do a BETTER job, are where it's at. If you bought Norton, you deserve this, you're throwing your money away by buying it in the first place.

 

[ssddx]

@ a REAL tech: And perhaps you should have a little more respect. Norton may not be the best choice, but it is a good choice for people are not computer-literate. As for kapersky, its the most ruthless AV i've used yet.

My experience with norton is that they will give you a reminder period, and then they will just cease your ability to update the software if you do not renew. In order for them to "auto-renew" you would either have to sign up for the service, or provide them your CC number in some way. I agree with cekasone, this could go either way.

 

[demonhorde665]

wehn my norton was almost up i did get teh option to shut the auto renewal off in an email , my issue was with what norton AV , does to your comp when you dont renew.. i anceled my noton AV becuase we didn't ahve teh money to renew .. but a couople days prior to my last My system started acting like a turd , games would crash , freeze , slow down like resources were being drained away, then the desktop performance also went down sharply.. so i did some digging , Norton was running an obsesive ammount of back programs that was chewin up most of my free ram , and this was the problem . what is odd Norton never did this before until my subscription was almost out .. ask me it was a last ditch effort by teh software , to convince me i needed it for a stable machine. well happy ending didnt involve resubscribing .. instead i uninstalled norton .. problem solved. but for most consumers who arnt as tech savy as i, might have concluded they had gotten a virus , and needed to update thier norton aka re subsdcribe. I seriously hope courts look into this sort of underhanded software code writing. after this expreince i'm not getting norton again , just on principals.

 

[demonhorde665]

[citation][nom]Rboy[/nom]Who uses this resource hogging crap? I dumped my av and firewall years ago. Virii and hacks are ancient history. Malware is the main threat and there are plenty of removal tools and tips for any problem incurred.An occasional scan by Malwarebytes and any of several free spyware apps is all you need.I have five kids and they all know how to avoid these things and what not to click on and I only occasionally have to clean up something.I say trash the AV use windows protection if it makes you feel better but my experience is common sense works better then any norton or Mcafee piece of crap[/citation]


actually its rather disgusting ,. about the time the whole IE MS debacle , MS was considering making an anti virus that was intergrated into windows but due to the massive stink the IE think stirred up MS canceled those palns for a free intergrated AV .. a case where buisness most certianly hampered tech growth , and to this day we are still stuck lookign for shitty 3rd party AV that chew up system resources and so on . me personally , i'd ahve nothign against MS adding a AV to windows. but i'm sure all tehese dirty crooked AV compnaies would get thier panties ina bunch over it

 

[Hilarion]

Actually they should probably be sued for their "virus/malware" like behavior.

I wanted to remove it from my system because it turned out to be a gross resource hog that got in the way of almost everything else I tried to do with my machine. When my subscription had run out I used the Windows Install/Uninstall to "remove" it from my system since it did not have an "uninstall" option in its menu. Less than a week later my firewall pops up telling me that "Symantec AV" is trying to connect to the internet from my machine.

Complained to Symantec and was directed to use a "special uninstaller" which I did. Another week later and my firewall again tells me about "Symantec AV" trying to connect to the internet. I had to manually track down the offending software and remove it, edit my registry and remove it from the hidden backup area.

That is NOT behavior I expect from a company that wants to be respected. They will never get my business again nor will I recommend them to anyone else.

 

[jjchmiel78]

I am not entirely convinced that they are not the ones writing all this virus code. I do not use antivirus on my home machine, and have no problems.