Symantec 1, Coop 0

Let me share one of my profession??s dirty little secrets. The folks in the computer press can always zip to the front of the queue when their PCs go haywire. All they need do is place a call to a industry contact and a savvy technician will miraculously emerge to save the day.

It??s an easy out ?? not to mention plainly unfair -- but don??t you wish you were so privileged because the reality is that service still stinks. Nearly three decades into the PC revolution, the computer industry??s thinking about post-sale support remains more honored in the breach than in the observance.

All this by way of introduction to my go-around with Symantec during Sunday night??s Academy Awards ceremony. After rebuilding my wife??s hard drive, yours truly attempted loading Norton AntiVirus 2005. But the install sequence failed because ?? according to the results from a hours-long Symantec diagnostic test ?? a Trojan horse program called adware.minibug had infected the drive.

This is the theme of a column that I??m posting Tuesday morning. I??ll cut to the chase to let you know I was stuck on the phone for more than two hours. When I finally reached a support rep, Symantec wanted to charge me a bundle. It??s a nice racket: they charge people to fix a bug that its products are supposed to eradicate. Unfortunately, the product can??t clean the drive because the install process is stymied by the infected file.

Doh!

It??s politically correct to say Microsoft is too big and Windows should be reined in. But might consumers be better off if all the anti-virus technology they need came free-of-charge as part of the operating system? We??ll soon find out because that??s the direction Microsoft is heading.