PIECE O’CRAP ALERT: So the Norton Internet Security 2005 on my laptop expired, and instead of just renewing, I foolishly “upgraded” to Norton Internet Security 2006. I’ve reinstalled several times, but it won’t update. When I try, it tells me that LiveUpdate isn’t installed. When I try to install LiveUpdate, it tells me that it’s already there and won’t install. Various visits to their support site have wasted a lot of my time, but left me right where I started. I’m ditching Norton and switching to something else — my time is worth more than their crappy product. Any recommendations? I need antivirus and firewall. Don’t care about spamblocking, adblocking, or parental controls.

UPDATE: At a reader’s suggestion, I downloaded and ran the Symantec “Intelligent Updater” program, which seems to have fixed the problem. Apparently you only get the “not terribly bright updater” bundled with the main program . . . . We’ll see how this works.

The other thing I’ve noticed from the email is that *every* program out there has *somebody* who hates it.