I've lost patience with the staff on the online chat.
I appreciate they are trying to help me, but they have misunderstood, misinterpreted or simply ignored the requests I have made for help.
My (free - yes, I know you get what you pay for!) Norton Online Family icon in the system tray recently showed a red x as part of the icon. When I hovered over this, the tool tip came up with the helpful message "Parent action is required". Now, at the time, I was logged into the main desktop PC in my home, with full administrator rights. There was no indication of what parent action I needed to take.
I logged onto Norton Online Family web portal, assuming that there would be some indication as to the action I needed to take... nothing. The children's user accounts looked fine and there was no error message or reason that the red icon had appeared. I contacted the online chat team and brought this to their attention (I don't know why I got in touch with them as I know the default answer is to uninstall/reinstall). I gave the representative details of the operating system (Win XP SP3) and the version of NOF and N360 (2.6.0.73 and 20.3.1.22). He initially suggested that I right-click on the icon, click "Update House Rules" and log in to the resulting log in screen to check that the rules had been updated correctly. Of course, when you click "Update House Rules" you don't get a log in screen coming up, so my confidence was already dwindling. Indeed after pointing this out, the uninstall/reinstall option for ALL NORTON PRODUCTS was suggested as the best course of action! Now, a few years back, I completed a full uninstall and reinstallation of all Norton products and this really screwed up a lot of the firewall settings, the organisation of usernames and password in the vault and my subscription details, generally causing more trouble that it was worth - so I was extremely reluctant to go down this route. I had to go out anyway, so couldn't commit to completing the uninstall/reinstall at that point.
The following day, I noticed that the red cross had disappeared. I checked the program and all still seemed to be in order. The version had automatically updated to 2.8.0.5 (I wonder what happened to the 2.7.*.* versions?) Following a prompt from the telephone call I received from Norton, I reinitiated the chat session to specifically check four things:
- Should I be receiving a prompt to log in to Norton Online Family when I click on "Update House Rules" (as per the previous chat session instructions)?
- Is there a page on the Norton website showing the version number of the latest version of the Norton Family product (thinking about the jump from 2.6.*.* to 2.8.*.*)?
- How does a customer know that there is an update available?
- Where can a manual update for Norton Family be found?
For the first question, I received an apology that I had been misinformed the previous session. The "Update House Rules" does not automatically open a log in screen to access Norton Online Family portal.
Neither the chat representative, nor a subsequent telephone representative has been able to tell me if the latest version number is shown somewhere on any Norton website.
The chat representative suggested that everyone receives an email from Norton when an update to Norton Family is available (news to me, I've NEVER received one - and yes, I've checked the spam filters, etc.)
Finally, manual updates can be found by logging in to:
Now option 1 gives you access to N360, Norton IS and Norton AV updates (no sign of Norton Online Family updates). Option 2 takes you to the login for the online portal which gives you access to the settings, but not to any updates. Option 3 doesn't work anymore!
From this, I hope you can see why I am exasperated! I would appreciate any feedback from the customer service team to answer what ought to be three simple questions. I asked the telephone representative to email me with his solution, when he had found answers to these questions that work - I must admit, I found it hilarious that he then told me that he didn't have access to email! A world leading company in internet security don't have access to email - what a joke! My subscription is coming to an end in about three months, I have been a satisfied customer of Norton/Symantec for over ten years, but this has really dented my confidence in the products and support to back them up and I will be reassessing my requirements and the range of providers before the subscription expires. I would not be surprised if I find a new provider as a direct result of this unacceptably poor service.