Persuing Ghosts and Viruses

On the day after Thanksgiving I wondered if I should try to hit the stores to pick up a couple things. The day before while at a family gathering I saw everyone looking through the ad inserts in the local paper. They all especially interested in what the big electronics stores had to offer. Curious to see what tactics they using this year to lure folks into the stores at the wee hours of the morning I took a peek myself.

To my surprise I saw something that interested me. Best Buy offering Photoshop Elements 5.0 for $50. No rebates, not some stripped down version, the real thing for $50. Yet I wondered, and noted the fine print under the price, I read the following "Minimum of 10 items per store". 10 items per store!!! Hmmmm.

The next day I got up around 9A and wondered if I should go see if they still had any left. After eating breakfast it occurred to me to check the Best Buy website. Sure enough they had it for sale there as well, and only $4 shipping, so I snagged a copy. Never even had to leave the house!

Later in the day it hit me I should check for any deals on the new Norton AntiVirus as my subscription about ready to expire and it often cheaper to buy the new version than pay for a subscription renewal. After looking around I found CompUSA offering NAV 2007 and Ghost 10.0 in a bundle for 1 cent. That's right, 1 cent, AFTER rebates. Hmmm, don't much care for rebates, but for 1 cent ... I looked at the rebate forms and they seemed straight forward. Still I wondered, I ate lunch and went back to the site. Yup, everything looked on the up and up, so I proceeded to place the order. When I got to the end I noticed the ship date had changed from 1-2 days to 3-4 weeks. What's this? The rebate only good for one month, what if it really does take 3-4 weeks for it to come or this just a glitch in CompUSA's software as the site running very slow due to the rush in traffic. I decided to go ahead with order and clicked the complete button.

15 minutes later I checked again and saw the bundle listed as Sold Out. Oh boy, what did I do? Perhaps I shouldn't have eaten lunch first?? I decided they would more than likely send out all the bundles as one big group, so I should see it within a week. Thankfully, that exactly what happened and I soon had the bundle sitting on my living room couch ready for installation.

I've heard all the horror stories of Norton product installations going bad, but have never experienced any personally. This all about to change. To make a long story short, installing the two products ended up taking over 6 hours to complete, but thankfully they work very well once properly installed. No damage to my computer for the experience either, just a protracted installation process do to Symantec failing to mention the new NAV2007 incompatible with several popular pieces of software which I happen to use. Turns out after poking around several forums on the web for a while, this not totally true, so I continued with the installation despite dire warnings to the contrary from the NAV2007 installer. Also I wound up having go through the entire installation process twice because Ghost didn't get registered properly the first time around, turns out you should install Ghost first, but they fail to mention this in the installation instructions supplied with the products.

As an aside, this bundle takes the prize for strangest product packing of the year. Each product comes in it's normal box, with the bundle shrink wrapped together, or so it seems. Once you pull off the shrink wrap you discover the two boxes attached to each other with double sided foam tape and simply will not come apart. Not handy for storing the boxes away if you need the Proof of Purchase down the road.

Want an excuse to stay up late some night this week? Go pick up for yourself the NAV2007/Ghost 10.0 bundle and start the install around 10P.