A few weeks ago, I complained about a serious bug in Norton Internet Security and the lack of meaningful technical support from the sub-continent. Shortly thereafter, I received a comment that spoke of Symantec's upgrade program, where I could upgrade to 2008 for free and use the rest of my subscription.

Well, in the interests of fairness, I did so, dutifully removing 2007 and installing 2008. Sure enough, the bug had been fixed---and two more appeared. Meanwhile, my mother calls to tell me that she couldn't get internet service and a local geek traced the problem to Norton 360, which he uninstalled.

My patience is at an end--Norton as been removed for now and all time--the divorce final.

Since I use my laptop rather promiscuously in all sorts of environments, I opted for another suite--this one by Trend Micro and highly rated by Consumer Reports. I installed the trial version without any hitches and noticed that my machine was running a lot faster right off the bat. I will do a full scan tonight and evaluate the software performance over the next couple of weeks before popping for a subscription.

In my experience, it actually takes quite a lot of really bad treatment before long time customers will finally give you the boot. Apparently Symantec really, really wants to be out of the business.