You mean like he had to go out and buy a legal copy? Especially when he could have gone out on the street and bought one for $1.

That we never hear of the free antivirus packages doing this? ClamWIN, AVG, Avast Personal... I'm sure there are several others.

Instead, I am constantly seeing that Symantec and Norton products for Windows (do they have any other products?) cause excessive CPU usage, or bog down the system (British pun intended there), or cause system failure. Why would anyone *pay* for software that is so notoriously dangerous?

AVG the other day detected that my copy of mIRC (a very old copy from the 90's that hasn't been used in over 5 years) was a trojan that was released under 8 months ago. Other than that supposed instance of a virus my PC was clean.

BTW AVG is the ONLY anti-virus to detect it. Norton didn't detect it and when I tried Mcafee it said the files were clean also.

so... AVG is not free from the same issues.

Why would people pay for this software? Well, perhaps it has something to do with that being all that PC World sells.... It always seems to be on 'promotion' and is very prominent in their stores. I hasten to add, I only visit PC World to chuckle at how expensive things are.

Indeed, the paranoid might question if PC World actually have some sort of exclusivity deal with Symantec/Norton.... Heaven forbid that I would make such a libellous comment myself!

I trained as a software engineer and in my person opinion these 'virus checkers' are often badly written and hog system resources due to the fact that they are fairly graphics heavy (quite unnecessary) and also launch numerous processes/services when Windows starts. Your average PC user (dumb by our standards) is perhaps even comforted by the noticeable degradation in performance once the virus checker has been installed. That's my theory anyway.

My choice of virus-checker is the (in my opinion) excellent NOD32 which is arguably the best virus checker available for the Windows platform. Will you see this being sold in PC World? Not likely.

OK, so AVG isn't free from these issues, but it is free*.....

So which would I rather have? A free virus checker that produces false-positives on files from the 90's I haven't used for 5 years or a paid product that deletes important Windows system files. Hmmm, let me think about that one.

* The free edition only

Simon, you're not paranoid, they are out to get you... If you look at the NAV boxes you get from PCWorld you will find the PCWorld logo printed directly on them. AFAIK they have been in bed with each other for some time & from what I hear from my clients it is almost as hard to buy a PC from there without it as it is to get one without Vista these days!

you actually BUY stuff from PC World !!!!!

I'd like to be rich enough not to care I was paying top dollar too ....

Yeah, there are a lot of libertarian types out there who say its your "choice" to run it or not, but evntually the vast middle will start to sue for these failures, and when a clever enough lawyer gets the right judge, the "limited liability" clause on the shrink/click wrap will be deemed an unconstitutional violation of our right to due process. Those two morning show idiots found out a signed waiver wasn't enough to protect them from a wongful death suite when they were warned ahead of time that drinking too much water will kill a person. Same thing will eventually apply to software licenses.

In UK law, I could see a case being made that an anti-virus package that renders a computer unusable is "not fit for the purpose" (I think that's still the expression used), not to mention not being "of merchantable quality", and indeed being a load of dingo's kidneys.

Warranty and licence terms do not, and cannnot override the purchaser's legal rights. A trading standards department could have a lot of fun with that....

The rules may well be different in China, of course.