Tom Mighell, writing on a NY Times story about computer users who buy new computers rather than deal with spyware issues, gets a little crazy about users who don’t take responsibility for properly configuring their security software. Here’s the story of someone who wished he had just bought a new computer:
In April my secretary’s 4 year old computer, a Dell Celeron 700 running Windows 2000, notified us that the virus protection software subscription needed to be renewed. I ran the update function, but instead of taking my money and allowing us to continue updating our virus protection, it posted an error dialog and dumped me into the Norton homepage. After some clicking, I found what I thought was the appropriate subscription renewal form, filled it out and got a renewal code. Unfortunately, I got the wrong product version, so the code didn’t work. I sent an email to Norton asking for a refund and help getting the right code. I haven’t heard anything back from them.
A couple of days later, I got an email from SW Bell, my DSL provider, offering me a free virus protection program. Yippee! I downloaded it, installed it, restarted my secretary’s machine, and bingo! The machine was completely locked up. Nothing I knew how to do (I’m a Mac guy, not a PC guy, and this story is just one of many that explains why) would fix the problem, so I called in a tech from a service that we use. He showed up the next day, diagnosed the problem, fixed it, installed new virus and spyware protection software, and billed me just over $400.
In light of the $400+ the tech guy billed me, the loss of the better part of 1 day of my secretary’s time, the loss of 3-4 hours of my time, and the fact that for $700 I could get a bigger, faster, better new CPU from the Dell website, shouldn’t I have just bought a new computer?
In the alternative, couldn’t the vendors of 2 different virus protection software products that failed at basic tasks have done a better job and saved me from this situation?