Entry 0746: Blog: 1

Four hours later and I am again instigating the Norton
Removal Tool procedure on the dreaded XP machine... God
how I hate Norton.. or Symantec .. or who ever they think
they are. Honestly !!!!. Talk about utter bullshit. These
guys should be taken to court for all the crap they spout
about their product. And I should know. I have literally
wasted hundreds of pounds on their rubbish software. And
I don`t mind saying this here... The test is in the usage
and having just spent yet another four hours trying to use 
SystemWorks 2006 Premier, which cost me over £50, just to
dump the software in a fit of screaming and shouting at 
the computer screen...... Calm.

It all started in the week when crappy XP decided
to lock the machine up on the boot screen. Several boots
later and the machine is on and running. I decided to 
back everything up and install Norton to do a disk
check. Before I started I said to myself, just take it
slowly and try not to get too worked up. Anyway... Deep
intake of breath... The painfull install and some twenty
minutes waiting for it to go through the motions. Then
the dreaded updates all 50MB of them... Another half
an hour wait... And then disk optimisation which after
25 minutes nothing but nothing happened other than the
drive light going round and round and round... Calm...
Anyway I stopped the process from the button on the
screen... You know that feeling when you see no activity
on a screen, but you know something is still happening.
Deeper intake of breath... Anyway nothing is happening
on the screen now and there isn't any response from
any buttons or even the old ctrl-alt-delete. Thing is
when ever I use XP on any machine this is the norm.
Microsoft decided obviously that because their OS
kicked out so often they would dispense with the egg
timer, and disable usability and functions, cus what
the hell. XP is the bottom of the computer pit for
crappy OS compatibility and usability with varying
systems. This XP machine I have has a 1300 processor
and tons of memory, so in theory it should be fine.
The hard drive is only 60% full and its 180GB. So
what is the big deal. Norton says that this crap
software will run on a much lower spec machine....

By the way, during optimisation there was no status bar
saying what it was doing, no message pane saying what
percentage of the process it was undertaking, no
indication what so ever of what was going on. 
' Way to go Norton ' Progress or what. I could run
their software on the Win95 machine and it would
run perfectly from the off... Honestly !!

Anyway...

I had to switch off at the button cus there was no
other choice. And this is where I lost it. Having
switched back on I sat here for over five minutes
waiting for Norton to finish what ever it does on
startup... Thing is it didn`t finish. There were
three icons on the screen and a scrolling kinda
icon with a monitor on I think. I have auto updates
switched off, not that that matters. Suffice to say
after five minutes I started to get a touch annoyed.
So I tried Internet Explorer... Inactive. I tried
My Computer... inactive. I tried to activate the
Norton Control Centre.... Inactive... I then after
another couple of minutes got a warning from Norton
about some aspects of the OS which they thought
I should deal with... Like full virus scan... Anyway
still no activity and the drive light is just flying
round. 

Finally Explorer kicked in... Quick search for Norton
Removal Tool and that`s what I am doing now. I`m not on the
XP machine now I might add, but on a Win98 Pentium III
with 650 processor, that works a dream. This computer
just doesn`t have any of the hangups of XP, nor does
it ever do anything without either showing the egg
timer or giving me control of all aspects of the 
computer. My goodness even the Amiga is more responsive
than XP for 99% of the time, and I am not exaggerating.

And so... In summary, XP proves again to be the crap
that it truly is. Not usable in my book, whatever
the kit your running. And as to Norton, well that
really is not in any way the thing it claims to be.
It can`t be can it... It did the complete opposite
of what it said it was going to do. Instead of helping
me it buggered my system up and made it unusable.

What is sad... And it is sad... I decided to get a PC
in 1996 cus of the failures of the Amiga... And yet
that Win95 machine is still running fine. It has
Norton Utilities on it, but predates the LiveUpdate
crap, so never rings home. And that software has kept
that machine healthy right up to this day. It still
has the same OS and hard drive on it. And this Win98
machine did benefit from Norton up to 2003 prior to
Norton bloating their perfectly usable product into
a mess... Sad yes... Cus I guess some of the basic
functions of this product could be run from a single
floppy disk. So why create the monster. The same
goes for MS cus after all, Windows is only just a
disk operating system. I say just only, cus really
I should say... just barely. 

If I had to choose between which was worse Norton or
Microsoft I would say both... Crappier than a crap
thing with a very good reason for being crap.

And yet... it wasn't always the case. 

Worth repeating the last part of my last blog.

[ scuzz:Acts 3 ] I flail myself in a masochistic ritual using
Microsoft. Somehow the pain helps me live with myself having
ventured into the darkside. Otherwise I would become a sheep
on a conveyor of moronic existence... Worshipping the Darth
Vader Bill Gates.... Obscurity is far more pleasurable, and wanting
reasoning for their bullshit dogma is not worthy of one moment
of my time. That's why I do not seek any reasoning beyond that
which most sensible and creative OS would make obvious.
But then practical, reasonable, sensible, obvious, user friendly.
thoughtful, creative etc etc etc are not something MS have ever
thought worthy of procuring.... 


scuzz