Yesterday I had to fix a Windows 7 laptop for a client. The mouse wasn’t working at all. The mouse cursor showed up on the screen, but wouldn’t respond to either the trackpad or an external mouse. Device Manager recognized it, but claimed to be unable to load the drivers. After poking around a bit (a slower process then usual, with only keyboard control), I resolved the immediate problem by uninstalling his (expired) copy of Kaspersky Anti-Virus.
Then the fun began.
He’d purchased (for $75) an upgrade for the Kaspersky, since his existing copy had expired. I pointed out that for the home user there are perfectly good free anti-virus programs out there right now, and that Kaspersky had just failed the all-important ‘Does This Mess Up My System?’ test. I suggested that he might want to get a refund on the Kaspersky and I could install an alternative (Microsoft’s Security Essentials).
He called Kaspersky for the refund and got a barely intelligible young lady in an obviously outsourced call center. She said that to process the refund she’d have to take remote control of his computer. I thought perhaps that was to verify that the software was uninstalled (the new version had never actually been installed) before processing the refund. After several minutes, and an unusual number of steps, we finally got her connected. Then, to my amazement, she opened a web browser, went to Google, and searched for Kaspersky Live Chat. What the what?
She found the link she was looking for in the Google search results, opened a chat session with Kaspersky support (wait, isn’t SHE Kaspersky support?) and asked for a refund while the customer and I looked at each other in amazement. The refund took a long time to process, even after I took over the keyboard and entered the order number (over the protests of the young lady on the phone), but was eventually completed. I set the customer up with his new AV software, gave the computer a quick once-over to make sure everything looked good, and called it a day.
Kaspersky Anti-Virus used to be a highly regarded product, and may still do an excellent job of catching viruses, but this is not the first time I’ve seen it cause more problems than it fixed. They also have the goofiest customer support I think I’ve ever seen. I cannot recommend this product, and in fact there is no reason at all for home users to be paying for anti-virus software at all. The above-mentioned Microsoft product, Avast!, and AVG Anti-Virus will all do a perfectly good job of protecting your computer.