This blog is primarily concerned with NIS 2007 (and a bit on NIS 08). I have nothing to say about more recent versions.

This blog is more or less dormant (except for occasional comments on related news), and is being left on-line as a historical record and perhaps as a warning to future generations of anti-virus coders.

2008-07-19

NIS 08 installed on Vista desktop PC

Well - there is 50 minutes of my life that I'll never get back.

The first download was 0.5 MB. Once I found the executable file (under Public/Downloads) and executed it, it downloaded another 68.35 MB. After the first restart, it was noted that NIS 08 was not up-to-date and required an immediate 'Run Live Update' and another restart.

The grand totals are:
1) Almost an hour (skipping the recommended Full Scan)
2) Almost 70MB of downloading (not including the unknown LiveUpdate)
3) Two restarts


The long-standing issue of the world's most inefficient update process (downloading some 46 files to see if any downloads are required) has been addressed: they've hidden it.

Now there is a simple three-step process. Each step still takes forever and the progress is completely hidden. There is an animation, but you have no idea if the update will take 2 minutes or 20 minutes. This is substandard.

This new non-communicative LiveUpdate process also hides all of their can't-do-simple-math errors.


More later.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Take a look at NIS 09 Beta

http://www.symantec.com/norton-beta/internet-security/

Anonymous said...

Actually, I (like many other perfectly reasonable people) am a bit leary of betas in general. Why should I assist in the debug of commercial software?

Oh dear, I guess such debugging effort applies even to fully release commercial software such as NIS07. Sigh...