A warning about Symantec products



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This is an FYI rather than a tip. I have long been a believer and supporter of Symantec products, even though most have always produced some quirky problems that required work arounds. Now I've come across a problem that will probably send me searching for a replacement from a competitor (unless Symantec rectifies this bug soon).

Neither Norton Internet Security nor Norton Personal Firewall supports dual booting. The problem? LiveReg and Product Update force themselves into two folders on the system partition (unlike the main programs, which allow the user to choose the installation folder). The result? On my computer, the firewall will not let me connect to the Internet when booting to WXP Professional; everything's fine when I boot to W2K Professional. Symantec says that problems will manifest themselves differently on each dual-booted computer, but in general, the product will not work as it is supposed to. Incredulous!

I could describe for you a whole slew of other problems associated with Symantec's NIS and NPF. Seems like these products need an extra label on their boxes that specify only one OS and one user account, unless all accounts are Administrator Accounts. Additionally, if installing to a FAT32 partition that's subsequently upgraded to NTFS and you've chosen NOT to include

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the parental control feature, then you (the Administrator and everyone else) will be locked out of changing or setting anything, and all settings will be set to their lowest (riskiest) setting. With NO free tech support, you'll pay $35 to have a Symantec tech rep point to one file (Nisum.dat) to delete (In fairness to Symantec, they have corrected this problem with an update).

Also on that label, Symantec should state that all rebate requests require personal follow-up and usually require resubmittal of the paperwork. This has happened to me three times now, the most recent because the rep did not accept an Internet receipt.


This was first published in April 2002

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