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Norton Antivirus: Activation is Seriously Broken...1

Norton Antivirus: Activation is Seriously Broken...1

Postby Mac33 » Fri Dec 12, 2003 10:31 pm

Norton Antivirus: Activation is Seriously Broken

Once a loyal customer of Norton Antivirus, Loyd has switched to a competitor. Why? Because Norton's activation scheme breaks too frequently, leaving his computer at risk.

Putting Customers at Risk

Until a couple of years ago, I'd never been much of a user of antivirus software. Mostly, it was because I had been lucky. After getting a broadband connection and finding a worm on my home network, though, I decided it was time to bite the bullet.


PC Magazine has always rated Norton Antivirus [NAV] highly, so I bought it for the first time back in 2002. Actually, I bought Symantec's Norton SystemWorks 2002, but eventually unloaded everything except the antivirus software. It worked great. It was unobtrusive, mostly compatible with the PC games I used, and saved my bacon several times as various e-mail viruses made the rounds. Later, I upgraded to the 2003 version -- mostly so I could get rid of the remaining detritus left behind by SystemWorks.

As my one-year virus definitions subscription drew to a close, it was only natural to upgrade to the 2004 version. I suppose I could have just paid for another year's subscription, but "newer is better", eh? Actually, some of the new features called out in PC Magazine's review sounded useful. Symantec's move to product activation was somewhat worrisome, but I'd grown comfortable with product activation in Windows XP, as well as a couple of high end applications, so I wasn't too concerned.

I bought Norton Antivirus on August 26th, installed it, configured it, and promptly forgot about it. Occasionally, NAV would pop up a message telling me it had automatically downloaded new antivirus definitions. It also caught a couple of Web-based Trojans, as well as some e-mail virus attachments. All in all, I was reasonably content.

Have you ever seen those horror movies where everything is wonderful at the beginning of the movie, then little hints foreshadow the nightmare to come? That's what happened here. My happy tale of antivirus success started coming unglued, a little at a time.

It began when I decided to manually check for a new set of definitions, as we got word of one of the numerous worms that began making the rounds in the fall. Norton refused to update, instead giving me a relatively obscure error and a link to their support site. The support page told me that NAV was either not activated or had encountered an activation problem. The fix was to reinstall. So I uninstalled and reinstalled. Of course, this step required re-activation, but Symantec seemed to accept this with no problems.

For awhile, things seemed good. The world was a happy place, and the time bomb that was NAV sat happily in my system tray. Then, like some evil boarding house resident, it began nagging at me. The NAV icon would have a little "x" in it, indicating it wasn't working. Occasionally, it would pop up and tell me that the evaluation period had expired and I needed to activate. On all these occasions, I just clicked on the "Activate" button, the app would activate, and things would be good again.

Last Friday, NAV popped up again and asked me to reactivate. I clicked the "activate" button again, but this time, I got a message telling me I'd run out of activations. It all but accused me of stealing the software. So I called tech support, and spoke with a very nice person who gave me an interesting link to the Symantec Web site.

In case you don't want to pay Symantec a visit, here's the salient paragraph from their document ID 2003093015493306 (dated October 31st, 2003):

Situation:

You install Norton AntiVirus 2004 (NAV) and activate the program successfully. However, whenever you restart the computer you are prompted to activate the program again. If you enter the activation code each time, then after a number of restarts you see the message "The trial period has expired. This product has been disabled because you have not activated it."

Solution:

Symantec is investigating this problem. The cause is unknown, and there is no solution at this time. This document will be updated when new information becomes available or a solution is found. "

As you can see, the company is aware of the issue. So what's the fix?

:source: ExtremeTech
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