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tmacuser · Feb 19, 2008, 12:16 PM

I upgraded to OS X 10.5.2 on Monday February 11 and Symantec AntiVirus 10.0 (the prior release) stopped working. I emailed Symantec with the problem and they indicated that I run a patch for StuffIt 12/NAV 10. That did work until I rebooted my Mac.

After the re-boot Norton AntiVirus Would not start again. I opened a new support problem and they had me run the MAC disk utility to fix permission bits in files. That did not work. I found if tried to start Auto-Protect off and on for a couple hours it would sometimes start. I told the support person that also. He then sends me an email that the only way to fix it is to upgrade to Norton AntiVirus 11.0.

I have a real problem with that. I bought the product about 9 months ago, so I still have about 3 months of support on a product that does not work. I could understand Symantec telling me to go to the new release if I had the current product for more than a year. Also they committed to a year of protection of my MAC when I bought Norton AntiVirus. Now they have lied about the year coverage.

It told the support person that was not acceptable, I had still more support on product coming, and I did not like their lazy support approach. I then got an email that the problem is closed.

Symantec has outsourced their support to India in the last year. One of the problems might be is when you move your support to an external company they do not have the incentive to support your products like you would since they don’t work for you. A support contract is used and if the contract is not well written they will drop customer problems, where if the firm was running the support they are more likely to go the extra mile (and put the support in the larger context of overall customer sales and satisfaction). Another problem is when you move your support to half the world away to a country that will operate their businesses differently, this will create other issues of where they do not put support into the context of the business they are contracted to support.

1. Anyone having problems with OS X 10.5.2 and Norton AntiVirus 10.0?
2. Anyone else having Symantec support problems with OS X 10.5.2 and AntiVirus 10.0?
3. Anyone having more support issues/problems with Symantec since they outsourced support?

Some of my Symantec emails:

Email 2/18 (note the lack of quality where they can’t spell the word “compatibility" correctly)….

Subject
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Technical Support

Discussion Thread
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Response (Prxxxx) - 02/17/2008 12:48 AM
Hello xxxxx,

Welcome back to Symantec Technical Support.

I understand from your message that you are unable to start Auto-Protect after downloading the MAC OS X 10.5.2 update.

I recommend that you upgrade to Norton AntiVirus 11 for Mac for full compatiblility with MAC OS X 10.5.x and this should resolve the issue that you are facing.

You can purchase Norton AntiVirus 11 for Mac upgrade for $29.95. You can browse through the list of Upgraded products in the link given below and then purchase Norton AntiVirus for Macintosh (NAVM) 11.0:

Email 2/19 ….

Response
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Greetings xxxxx,

You had recently contacted us for assistance regarding your Norton/Symantec product. This e-mail is a follow-up to the solution we had provided. Please let us know if this issue has been resolved to your satisfaction.

If the problem still persists, we are always here to assist you.

Thanks and regards,
Symantec Customer Service

MacosNerd · Feb 19, 2008, 12:22 PM

Norton/symantec has a long sad history of not supporting the Mac and their software running like crap. I like many other people avoid symantec like the plague.

Cold Warrior · Feb 19, 2008, 01:01 PM

It runs like crap anyway. And you don't need it unless you really want to scan attachments before sending to Windows users.

Sherman Homan · Feb 19, 2008, 01:16 PM

You can safely get rid of it. Even in Cold Warrior's suggestion, an attachment would have to be infected by a Windows user and then sent to you.

peeb · Feb 19, 2008, 05:26 PM

Another vote for ditch all that ****. ClamAV if you must.

JKT · Feb 19, 2008, 08:43 PM

ClamXav - Download Page

Set the sentry to watch your Downloads and Mail downloads folders (and any others where content is coming in from the internet, e.g. iChat attachments folder), schedule auto-updating of the virus definitions on an e.g. nightly basis.

ghporter · Feb 20, 2008, 07:10 AM

I've never had a second's problem with Symantec antivirus products on any platform. I've never experienced them "running like crap" nor doing any harm at all. I also get the corporate version free from my school, so that may have something to do with it... I run Norton Antivirus 10.1.2 on my iMac running Leopard, and it runs fine.

If you don't have some contractual NEED to run an antivirus product on your Mac, why do so? If you do need one for that sort of reason, use what the contract requires (especially if it's provided free).

P · Feb 20, 2008, 03:22 PM

Actually, Norton Antivirus is pretty terrible on Windows as well.

ghporter · Feb 20, 2008, 05:54 PM

Originally Posted by P

Actually, Norton Antivirus is pretty terrible on Windows as well.

Again, not in my experience, but mostly I have been using the Symantec Corporate products...

MacosNerd · Feb 20, 2008, 06:46 PM

Nor mine, while I think the Mac version is aweful, I've used the PC version for years and its much better then some of the others I've tried, like mcafee

P · Feb 21, 2008, 09:06 AM

It does what it claims to do, but it is very slow and lows down everything. It is also insincere in its renewal reminders (it tries to get you to re-up a few months before the old one is up, and the renewal is one year FROM THE RENEWAL DATE, not from the expiry date) which annoys me. It always decides to scan when I don't have the time for it to do so - like just after waking the laptop - so it gets in the way as much as possible.

Not that McAfee is very good either. AVG is much better.

ghporter · Feb 21, 2008, 09:20 AM

Originally Posted by P

It does what it claims to do, but it is very slow and lows down everything. It is also insincere in its renewal reminders (it tries to get you to re-up a few months before the old one is up, and the renewal is one year FROM THE RENEWAL DATE, not from the expiry date) which annoys me. It always decides to scan when I don't have the time for it to do so - like just after waking the laptop - so it gets in the way as much as possible.

Not that McAfee is very good either. AVG is much better.

I've never noticed ANY performance hit from Norton AV. The renewal reminders aren't so much sneaky as (supposedly) helpful-if you write it down on your calendar that you have to renew on or about a specific date, then you can just ignore them until that date. It's simple time management. It's just like a magazine subscription in regards to the reminders going out.

I should also point out that AVG is "decent" at doing its job, while Norton is at the top of the class in finding, eradicating, and blocking viruses on PCs. No comparison at all.

P · Feb 23, 2008, 06:58 PM

I'll admit to not having a virus in almost 20 years, so if AVG can't find them, I guess I wouldn't know...

My beef about NAV on Windows is that the version I have on the work laptop is the most annoying piece of **** program I have ever seen. It scans all the freaking time, and it pays no attention to what I'm doing at the moment. I schedule my lunch breaks after that garbage, because I literally can't work while it is working. The problem is not the CPU usage, it is that it uses up all of the disk bandwidth while scanning. It completely kills an otherwise fine laptop while working, which no other AV program does. The test I linked to show why, I think, which is why I won't install Norton on anyone's Windows machine.

As for the renewal stuff: It should work like any other subscription. If I renew a magazine subscription or something for another year and when I have a month left, I then have 13 months left on the subscription. Norton does not work this way, and I think that it is borderline fraud to design the system that way.

tmacuser · Mar 3, 2008, 03:16 PM

Symantec did finally support my problem. As you saw above in my originally post the last thing Symantec had sent was an email indicating the problem was closed:

Partial email…
“You had recently contacted us for assistance regarding your Norton/Symantec product. This e-mail is a follow-up to the solution we had provided. Please let us know if this issue has been resolved to your satisfaction.
If the problem still persists, we are always here to assist you.”

I sent them an email back indicating that I did not like the way the problem was being closed, I was still under support for V10 and being told to buy a new version while still in the year of support of current product was not acceptable, and I was going to do some posting myself about Symantec customer service.

In about a day the support person came back with an email now saying the problem was not closed. They reiterated in their email the solution was to upgrade. The body of the email was about the same as the one I listed in my original post (e.g. other than the sentence the problem was open), except they now added the following sentence in the middle of it:

“Also, you can avail a refund for your Norton AntiVirus 10.0 and then purchase the Norton AntiVirus 11.0 upgrade.”

I took them up on it. They actually gave a reasonable partial refund for V10 (i.e. discounting the time I used it). I am not having any problems with V11.

Clearly in this situation to get it resolved you have to yell. If Symantec determined they were not going to fix V10 why not offer an upgrade/refund to customers under current support from the start? Why wait for the customer to go ballistic and then give a second email, which then offers upgrade/refund (especially when Symantec posted that V10 is support in OS X 10.5)?

I originally picked Symantec because I have had good experiences (like the ghporter posts, also like your support of the Red Cross) with them over the years both on Mac and PCs (I saw some of you prefer other products and have had other experiences). My experience here with Symantec was pretty poor. I still believe they have some disconnects between their sales and support.

Note:
During this problem incident Symantec changed their tech support website at: Symantec product compatibility with Mac OS X 10.5 (code-named Leopard)
To now state that “While some features of Norton AntiVirus 10.x are compatible with Mac OS X 10.5, only Norton AntiVirus 11 is supported on Mac OS X 10.5.” I hope that is not positioning to avoid supporting other people in my same position. Hopefully it is just a statement of the issues with V10.

ghporter · Mar 3, 2008, 04:02 PM

Originally Posted by tmacuser

I hope that is not positioning to avoid supporting other people in my same position. Hopefully it is just a statement of the issues with V10.

Probably the latter. Apparently enough people complained about V10 being squirrly with Leopard that they had to admit that their older stuff didn't cut it. Ideally they should provide a real fix for people with V10, but there seems to be some sort of issue with the internals of V10 such that it's not as simple as just fixing a few of the files in the package.