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The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.

12:22pm on Wednesday, 12th January, 2005:

Broadband Woes

Outburst

Broadband finally made it to my house on 23^rd December, 2004. I should be happy, right?

Well I am happy with broadband itself. What I'm not happy with is Norton Utilities' gleeful screwing up of it. Basically, one time in every four that I try to connect, my anti-virus software locks up. The only way out of it is to reboot the PC. I have to do this using the power button, because the lock-up is so bad I can't even call up Windows Task Manager (unless I call this up first, which I'm doing increasingly often now).

Norton's anti-virus software is a crock. It makes everything runs slow, except the stuff it fails to make run at all. Things are so bad, I'm wondering whether I might be better off risking a virus rather than running it. My main complaints are:

• It does a virus-detection scan of my PC once a week. There's no way to schedule it to do the check less frequently. This means I can be playing a game when suddenly everything crawls to a halt. I have to CTRL-ALT-DEL out of the game and switch off the scan.
• When I actually let it do its scan, it takes many hours (like 4 or 5). At the very end, it hangs and I have to kill the process. Thus, it doesn't even remember it's scanned my PC and dutifully chastises me because my last full scan was never.
• It has a parental control list (hmm, this may be the firewall rather than the anti-virus software, but they co-operate in their misery-making). I have nothing against parental control lists, but I don't want one. I switch it off. Nevertheless, despite this, every once in a while the parental control list is updated. This happens at unpredictable times and takes 5-10 minutes (!); while it's going on, pretty well any attempt to use the computer will hang it. About the only thing that's relatively safe is moving the mouse, although even that is incredibly jerky. Why is there no way to tell it that I'm never going to switch parental control on, so there's no need for it to install an enormous list "just in case"?
• The virus-detection is all-or-nothing. It either checks every file whenever it's opened or it checks none unless you specifically tell it. Why can't it check files once, when they enter your system, and then leave them be? I can't even tell it not to check programs I myself wrote! It makes a meal of opening .doc files I've opened hundreds of times before and know are uninfected by anything other than bad English. Augh!

I was in PC World the other day and there was this harassed-looking woman with a pushchair looking at the display of anti-virus software. An oily sales assistant came up and asked her if she was considering something to protect her computer. He made the mistake of gesturing at the well-stocked Norton Anti-Virus display. She launched into an immediate tirade against it that was a joy to behold. As an IT professional, she was well aware of the danger of viruses, which is why she'd installed Norton back in 1997. She'd found the latest version such a problem that what she was "considering" now was anything but Norton. Norton made her 3.4MHz PC run like 700MHz and she was not happy. The sales assistant, attempting to defend the product, asked if she had firewall software installed. This was another error on his part, as she dived straight into an explanation of how she'd had to edit several initialisation files and the registry to get Norton Firewall to do what she wanted. At this point, I left; it was too uneven a contest, and I didn't want to end up feeling pity for the sales assistant.

Someone, somewhere, must be developing anti-anti-virus software. I'll buy it the moment it hits the stores.

Referenced by Cross-Version, Cross User.

Referenced by Lost Memories.

Referenced by Always On!.

Referenced by Catch up.

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Copyright © 2005 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).