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Off Topic: AntiVirus Programs | Vendors (soapbox mode ON)



This is a reprise of a post of mine to an OS/2 List. Though
off-topic, it
may be of interest to someone here.

JF

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> Wayne wrote:

> Thanks, I didn't think Norman anti-virus was causing the
problem, my
> concern is that perhaps I got a virus through an email that
might have
> caused the extremely high processor utilization

This is not responsive to your query, but I thought I would jump
in here
and mention that I may be reaching the point of exasperation with
McAfee
-- again. This time, it's much more about the company than the
product.
(My longterm problem with their OS/2 version crashing, discussed
here
in the past, was cured when their 130 engine came out around a
year
ago, and this fix continued with the later release of their
current
160 engine.) Overall, their AV product has been more than
adequate,
although a couple of their competitors have smoked them in
comparative
reviews I have read.

My beef with them is that they are unreachable and unresponsive.
All I wanted to find out -- before bothering with another
VirusScan
upgrade -- was why it was not possible to activate the On Access
scanner Service in their Win-32 product, in a fresh install of
W2K.
(If a bunch of app.s had already been installed, one might
surmise
that this was another case of lousy Win-32 Registry conflicts.)
Was this a known issue, because I had their previous version for
NT,
instead of the latest one ? To quote from my latest email to
McAfee Customer Service:

"So far, my contact with your Customer Service apparatus has been

completely unsatisfactory. It has included: being shuttled from
department to department (mostly a maze of recorded messages that

amounts to an irritating waste of time); an occasional "live"
representative who has no useful information and just sends me
back out into the maze; long dead email addresses (given to me
by customer service people who should know better) that just
return form letters; an inadequate "help" website that can do no
better than inform me I can pay to speak to a Tech Support rep.
But this is a pre-sales question, of the sort most any other
company can and would be able to answer as a matter of course."

There is really no good excuse for this. It tells me that a Co.
(such as HP in hardware, too many other examples) just does not
give a rat's ass about the individual end user. Time to take
one's business elsewhere.

We scarcely need _any_ AV program for OS/2, but for Win it is
rather essential. My choice of vendor was always premised upon:
1) Who offers multi-platform support, for one reasonable purchase

price ? and 2) Who is large enough to have the resources to make

frequent and comprehensive virus signature updates available ?
The answer seemed to work against the smaller vendors.

Jordan