About a month ago I needed to renew a subscription to Symantec for my Norton anti virus protection. When directed to the renew page the price to simply renew was the same price to upgrade to the latest and greatest protection, Norton Internet Security 2008. A no brainer ..I upgraded and spent the next 20 minutes or so downloading, installing and rebooting.

A week ago I get a message from the application telling me my product required activation but my current activation key has been used too many times and is no longer valid. I can connect to the internet but have no protection from all the nasties out there.

Time for a call to technical support …and the number of hoops to have to jump through before you reach the magic tech support number or the 20 minute queue before the phone was answered was enough to make even the most patient person crazy.

But I have to say once my call had been answered the service was amazing. The tech guy asked me a few basic questions and then asked if I would grant him remote access to my computer. He logged in and did lots of geeky test to figure out the problem. It took him 15 minutes and successfully sourced the problem and fixed it. There is no way this could have been accomplished the old fashioned way with tech support directing you to click here and there. Progress at last for technical support!