A few days ago I did a clean reinstall of my Windows machine to clean up the mess of partitions and OS boot menus that had developed from trying out different OS’s. While reinstalling drivers, I discovered that my computer came with Norton Internet Security so I figured I may as well install it1, I also discovered an nVidia firewall tool and installed that too. Then I started downloading programs to install – firefox, Java etc. Everything I downloaded was corrupt. I disabled both firewalls and everything was still getting corrupted, even though I could download them on my Mac just fine. Even JavaScript files and applets were being corrupted while downloading.

Eventually, I uninstalled both the nVidia firewall tool and Norton Internet Security and suddenly all my downloads worked fine. Now I can kind of understand problems arising from having two internet security apps filtering and messing with downloads at the same time, but I can’t understand why they would still cause problems when they were supposed to be disabled. If you’re going to mess with my downloads there are some key things you need to do:

1. Tell me that you’re changing the contents of my download. Don’t do this through a pop-up dialog, that will drive me nuts – a task bar icon would do.
2. Give me the option to disable it temporarily or permanently and actually disable.
3. Give me a way to undo the changes you made to my downloads without having to redownload them. It’s really annoying to download 150Mb of JDK and Netbeans just to discover it’s corrupt and then have to download it all again.

Better yet, just don’t mess with my data. If there’s a security issue tell me about it and let me choose what to do, otherwise get out of the way.

1 – I do all my web browsing, email etc on my Mac so internet security on my PC isn't a concern↩