SCOUG-HELP Mailing List Archives

<< Previous Message << >> Next Message >>

Date:	Thu, 16 May 2002 11:14:20 PST7
From:	"J. R. Fox" <jr_fox@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
To:	scoug-help@scoug.com
Subject:	SCOUG-Help: Re: AV programs & the companies behind them (soapbox mode ON)

Content Type: text/plain

=====================================================
If you are responding to someone asking for help who
may not be a member of this list, be sure to use the
REPLY TO ALL feature of your email program.
=====================================================

Wayne Cypress 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 irri-
tating 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 tended to work against the
smaller vendors.

Jordan

=====================================================

To unsubscribe from this list, send an email message
to "steward@scoug.com". In the body of the message,
put the command "unsubscribe scoug-help".

For problems, contact the list owner at
"rollin@scoug.com".

=====================================================

Return to [ 16 | May | 2002 ]

SCOUG, Warp Expo West, and Warpfest are trademarks of the Southern California OS/2 User Group. OS/2, Workplace Shell, and IBM are registered trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation. All other trademarks remain the property of their respective owners.