Trend Micro Virus Protection

A Rant.

When we bought our computer however many years ago it's been, like 6 or 7, we really didn't know what all we needed so the helpful salesgirl at Best Buy (and I'm not being facetious here, she was very helpful and it was a pleasure for her to take so much of our money) put together a package of all the stuff we would need including a virus protection program and a spyware program. Which have all worked just fine all of these years with us paying our subscription fees each year and everything has run quite smoothly and we haven't had our computer taken over by aliens or anything.

Until yesterday. When the Trend Micro Virus Protection subscription auto-renewed, which I knew it was going to do because of the reminder email that I got a few days ago. Instead of renewing just once with just one $62.95 charge on our debit card, they renewed it twice in two separate transactions, charging me $62.95 twice on our debit card. Which is a lot of money.

So, I find their phone number and call them up and wait for a while listening to you are on hold classical music that is so loud that I have to take the phone away from my ear and put it on speaker phone which I always forget we even have and am always afraid you can't hear me unless the phone is next to my ear. I wait and wait and finally get a person to talk to and explain the situation and she says she will cancel one of the renewals but it may take 5-7 days for the charge to be reversed and my money is credited back. Okay, well I'll just have to wait a while for my money to be returned even though it's really annoying to have what could be a trip to the grocery store held hostage for 5-7 days.

Then I go to download and install the renewal program and everything is going fine until it stops with an error message that my computer is not compatible and click here to find out how to make your computer compatible. Which involves like 5 different steps and something about disk space and rams and go to microsoft and upgrade which looks like it involves buying more software from microsoft and you know what? FORGET ABOUT IT! Too much work that I don't even understand what you are talking about and sorry that I have an older antiquated computer but if your software won't work with my computer I'M SURE I CAN FIND SOMETHING ELSE THAT WILL! Oh. My. God. I was SO frustrated! And out $125.00 for the two times you charged me for this piece of crap!

Instead of calling again to cancel the second subscription renewal which in hindsight I probably should have done, I followed the instructions to click here and there to return an item, choosing the NOT SATISFIED option and filling in the space provided that it doesn't work on my computer. So far I have not gotten a confirmation email back that my subscription is cancelled and my $62.95 in the process of being returned so it I don't get one by the end of the day I HAVE YOUR PHONE NUMBER AND WILL BE CALLING!

But now our computer is (shudder) vulnerable to viruses so now what? Google virus protection programs of course! And the first one that comes up is a 30 day free trial for Norton Virus Protection and if you decide to keep it after the 30 days it's $39.99 a year so it's cheaper and I was able to download and install with absolutely no problem whatsoever.

Speaking of free 30 day trials, I was thinking about trying out Netflix for movies but could never get on their website because it kept telling me I needed to enable cookies which as far as I could tell were enabled, so after trying a couple of times just said forget about it and went with Blockbuster for their free 30 day trial. And so far have been very happy with their service and now that Netflix is not offering as many movies, really glad that I wasn't able to get on their website. I get the movies from Blockbuster in just a couple of days, they send an email that they are on their way, and they also send another one to let you know that they got them back. I'm liking it a lot so far. It costs more than Netflix but if you can't even get on their website then the few extra dollars for Blockbuster is probably worth it.