Saturday, January 23, 2010

Hours and hours with Norton tech support

This post will probably be of little interest to most people, but I'm venting a bit.

Back in late December, my Norton anti-virus and firewall went through an automatic update. Ever since then, I have not been able to sync my phone with my computer. This means that the only up to date calendar I have is on my computer, and that's a bitch to access on the run.

So today, with some time to kill on a dreary day, and another computer in my life, so I can still work and play while the tech guys mess around, I started an on line support session with Norton about 2:30 PM. It is now almost 5:30 PM, and I am being transferred once again up the line to a manager.

Each person I've "spoken" to has taken damned near forever to answer each question I've asked, and I've frequently resorted to typing in "are you there?" My guess is that they are asking someone else for support or consulting a manual between typing information to me.

The one thing that has worked is to actually uninstall Norton. Then my phone synced perfectly. But as soon as they reinstalled Norton, my phone won't sync again. I can't possibly be the only person with this problem. As a matter of fact, there is a Symantec help page listing the fix, but I can't find all the files needed to follow the steps listed. But apparently, neither can the people at Symantec.

Needless to say, this is not looking good for Norton.

Update: 6:00 pm - the supervisor was just flying through fixing things on my computer. He had remote access and was clicking and typing in commands. Oh, I'm sure this is going to work.

Nope, still not syncing.

I think he wen to check with HIS supervisor. Let's see what happens now. Still not syncing. Trying more things. Still not syncing.

We are now moving into four hours with tech support. At least the responses are getting faster.

So, we tried getting rid of SpyBot. Let's see if that works.

It's now 8:00 pm, and we finally got it fixed! We had to update the driver for Windows Mobile, and who knows what else. I was on line with the supervisor for almost three hours, had dinner, and drank a beer, but it's finally fixed!

Norton has been redeemed, and they extended my subscription for 90 for my trouble.