eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005 review:1 stars (completely useless - garbage) - at first this seems like the perfect antirvirus program... cheap, uses up very minimal resources, simple to use.. lifetime subscription for free.. what could be wrong?
EVERYTHING. see, the problem isn't that this program can't find viruses.. the problem is IT FINDS THEM AND DOESN'T DO ANYTHING WITH THEM. that's right, it leaves the viruses right there!! how is that useful in any way? i looked in options to make sure it cleaned or deleted viruses, but still the log report would announce to me "(this many) viruses could not be deleted or cleaned." well, thanks for nothing. i'm going to return this and get a real antivirus program.1 stars (Worse Than a Virus) - I purchased CA's antivirus software because I had read some good reviews. After purchasing I downloaded the most current version. I installed it on one of three PCs in the house. All reasonably new and powerful Dells: 2 running McAfee and 1 running Norton. The first PC is XP Pro. The installation went smoothly, with only one "program must terminate" error that did not seem to affect the installation. I noted that the program was smaller in disk space and in memory footprint. I tested this for a week with only one occurrence of needing to reboot due to some obscure failure (red X over the icon in my system tray).
I decided it was good to use and purchased two more licenses to install on the two XP Home machines in the house. This did not go well. Now, I have two machines that are requiring me to completely reinstall Windows. After removing both McAfee and Norton from these two respective PCs, they booted up fine. Then I installed CA eTrust Antivirus version 7.0.6.7 and the problems started. The PCs both would boot to the Welcome screen and then freeze. About 20% of the time when booting in Safe Mode they would finally get all the way to the desktop (after 30 minutes of chunking) only to get a message "Windows must now restart because the remote procedure call (RPC) service terminated unexpectedly". Then a 50 second timer starts and Windows and the PC reboots. The taskbar is unresponsive while Windows is up and the CPU is pegged. For this 50 seconds there is no way to interrupt the automatic shutdown. Basically, the installation of this software made the PC behave as if it was infected by a very bad computer virus.
I spent 45 minutes chatting over the Internet with friendly Sameet. The final outcome of that painful communication was that Sameet types something like: "I must inform you that I am not authorized to work on this problem because it is your problem and I am not authorized."
So, now I am reinstalling Windows XP Home on two machines and returning CA eTrust EZ Antivirus for a full refund. Looks like I will be sticking with Norton from now on. I think CA is rushing this product to market without doing enough testing. Don't buy it unless you like reinstalling Windows.
1 stars (Unable to uninstall) - Once my year-long subscription expired, I have been unable to uninstall CA ETrust. It now pops up a nag window about every 20 minutes, and when you click exit, it pops up a browser window and takes you to CA's web page. I have tried uninstalling many different ways to no avail. This has been going on for months and makes my computer painful to use.
My attempts to reach support are futile. Their support page doesn't work in my browser (IE 6.0) and the phone line is pay (which I will probably end up paying).
This is much worse than a virus. At least with a virus I can go buy Norton and clean things up. |
