On 11/30/2015 I called support about a simple billing issue. The tech insisted that he had to dial into my computer. Once there he goes through and says two other people accessed the computer but would not tell me his ip address so I could see if one address was him. At least one address was Dell support as I told him. He next goes to my Event Viewer and says there are too many errors there. I explain that I just reinstalled Windows and at least one device came with 32 bit drivers, I am now on a 64 bit system and the driver upgrade instructions were none too clear, probably resulting in some errors. When he hung up I noticed that almost all of those Error Messages were really warnings and not errors. Finally, he looks at my services and is disturbed that some are off. Many of the system services are set to manual start by Microsoft and do not start unless they are needed.
The upshot of all this was that he wanted to get me a $499 service call from Microsoft to clean out the event log, refund my money for Norton 360 and have me use Windows firewall. As you can gather from the above I don’t think anything is wrong here and a Google search gives instructions about how to clean the error log.
So I guess my question is: Is this a rouge technician, or has Norton decided that it is more profitable to sell Microsoft service calls than sell its products? Sorry I don’t have his name but the call was made about 9AM EST on 11/30.
My profile on the blog may call me a newbie but I have been programing since 1963 and did a stint as an IBM Systems Programmer.
.