CompuUSA sold customer Norton 2002

[tacoeater]

I am reinstalling the system (98) for a customer who took her computer to CompUSA. It didn't go well for her, says everything was worse. The thing that has me confused is that they sold her Norton 2002 which she supposedly installed. Then she downloaded Norton 2005 somehow and paid nothing for it and it was working. I had never heard of anything like this. Anyone else know how this could work. I backed up the Norton folder from My Documents which had a file with the product key. Also went into Norton and wrote down all kinds of stuff about the customer ID and this and that so that if this was legit I could use it to call Norton.
Well I already know that the Norton 2005 final that I downloaded to her desktop then installed would NOT take the product key that was in My DockuMints. I did not install Norton 2002 first. If anyone can shed any light on what might be going on here I would be very appreciative.
Alan

[TheJackal]

Either she downloaded a trial version, or she downloaded an illegal cracked version.

[tacoeater]

i will have to get the full story when i take her computer back tomorrow but she honestly isn't smart enough to do this dishonest download thing. and she has bastante dinero.
her story was just as i said. they told her to install 2002 and download 2005 and when i checked 2005 before i formatted and reinstalled it was running and activated with an expiration date one year in the fewture.
in another post someone was talking about CompUSA and an XP disk he claims to not have received a key for..........
who knows what the truth is here. just thought someone else might have heard of this scheme.
i will try to get the link she used for downloading 2005! that ought to tell me what was going on here.
honestly, i hope it was a shady trick pulled on her so I can just put AVG and be done with this.
down here (south texas) the techs working in these stores are not always the best and there could be a dishonest one here and there too!

[Panama Red]

Regardless of this being legit or not, tacoeater, I'd still favor AVG over Norton '05. Both 04 and 05 and pretty bloated. They use a ton of resources and noticeably slow things down. I've recommended removal to several customers and they were amazed at the difference in performance with running AVG. Of course, they also like the price of AVG Free!

[jimmyrules712]

i second panama.

everytime i work on a PC i do my best ot talk the owner into letting me take off norton, in exchange for AVG, even if they did pay $70 for it. AVG is so much better.

recently one friend's parents (who are fairly well off, but not comp literate) were having a lot of various computer trouble. They paid me $100 to make it work like new. First thing i did was remove every symnatec and norton program on it, and installed AVG. comp ran perfectly afterwards.

[tacoeater]

Well I finally gave up on Norton after calling their customer support two times. The first time I did not have the customer's email address. The second time I had everything they asked for and called back. The representative said she was going to email me everything I needed to activate the downloaded copy of Norton 2005 and she never sent it. I have deleted Norton and installed AVG.

[LiVeWiRe]

Here's an interesting article regarding activation problems with Norton AV:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1779931,00.asp

-LW