Symantec Semantics

Last night, I spent an hour and a half installing the Norton Premium System Works onto my home laptop. And I can say, authoritatively, that Premium does not mean tasty, or automatic, or damn fine. It does have features that the others do not...but they are challenging, and they make assumptions that I'd just as soon they not have made.

For example, part of the package is what they call GoBack, which is a 'restore my files' deal. Well, that sounded good to me, and was in fact part of why I bought the upgraded package. What I DIDN'T expect was that as part of installation, it would decide that this meant it needed to take a (presumably compressed) picture of my entire hard drive...including about twenty meg of files that never change, and are easily reinstallable. There went twenty minutes of my evening. Another function was their Backup package, which I thought meant that they were offering an off-site backup service. Ah, no. It meant they would backup files for you...once you downloaded and installed Microshaft's .NET service. Well, okay, its not that big a deal -- but I didn't expect it. Right now, the back up is running, but its just a test. I need to figure out how to tell what files it ought to be backing up, and then how to get them off this laptop and to a secure location. Pretty soon, I can see, I'll need a whole backup architecture.

Software should make life simpler, and I suppose it usually does. But not this stuff.