LiveUpdate is Dead

Scott Hardie | October 9, 2003
If anybody else wants to vent about Norton Antivirus, here's the place. (I know that some users are annoyed by the LiveUpdate windows that pop up every 24-48 hours, jerking you out of whatever computer game you're playing or web page you're reading, to inform you that it has installed a few new virus definitions for you.)

My annual subscription lapsed on October 2nd. I liked Norton AV, and I planned to renew my subscription as soon as I had some money next week. But the goddamn piece of shit kept nagging me! At a different time every day, It would jolt me out of whatever I was doing to pop up a bright red window saying "Warning! Your subscription has expired!" (Often I'd be playing The Sims, which gets buggy if I switch to another program and then switch back, so I'd have to shut it down, reboot, and load it again when Norton AV did this.)

Needless to say, nagware is highly annoying; that's how it got its own derivative nickname. But Norton AV incensed me further by providing no way for me to turn it the fuck off. The program loaded whenever I started Windows, and did not have any option to disable this feature. (It was not in my Startup folder; it did this on its own.) I could tell it to stop doing auto-searches, and specifically to stop searching every time I started Windows, but I couldn't get the son of a bitch to stop auto-loading in general. The consequence is that I had no choice but to continue facing that bright red popup every day until I paid them more money. Well, screw that! Nothing pisses me off more about a program than when it acts like it owns my computer! I completely deleted the software from my machine, and for the foreseeable future, I will not be re-installing it. When I get paid next week, I will find some other AV software out there, one that does not take over my machine and harass me until I pay its creator more money. Fuck Norton AV!

Anna Gregoline | October 9, 2003
I've become increasingly annoyed with the "cleverness" of companies and spam artists in creating pop-ups and nag-windows that are harder and harder to defeat. Usually the way to disable them is just cleverly hidden, or difficult for the non-computer-savvy person to fix. I feel your pain. P.S. I asked my cubicle-mate how to spell savvy, and I said that I always want to spell it with two "a's." He said that's because I have a Chicago problem. Accents are weird, aren't they? =)

Scott Hardie | October 9, 2003
It don' matter ha long I been in Florida yet, I ain' got no accent.

Dave Stoppenhagen | October 9, 2003
I've run into the same problem with my Norton program at home, hell the AV on my work computer constantly shuts down on me and then freezes my system when it comes back up.