Found another good "cross-rebate" deal. For those not in the know of my ad-hoc terminology, a cross-rebate deal is a deal in which you can purchase two products and get a competative update rebate for the other product. With a little luck, it allows you to get two products for free.

This one's at CompUSA, and it's for the Norton Utilities/AntiVirus bundle and OnTrack SystemSuite 4.0. If purchased together, the price comes to about $95, but you'll get two $20 rebates printed out at checkout. Furthermore, both products have competitive-update rebates in the box for another $20 and $35, and four rebates all told come to $95. That means that you can get the Norton and Ontrack utility suites for the price of tax and a couple month's wait for rebates to come in.

On top of that, you can do what I did --try out both products, pick your favorite, and sell the other one on eBay. If you do that, you'll probably end up covering the tax and getting your favorite utility suite for free!

In my case "favorite utility suite" ended up being OnTrack SystemSuite. It seems to do everything the Norton product does plus more (uninstaller, firewall). Also, it doesn't require a lot of registration to work --Norton's virus checker required a lot of hoop-jumping before I could download the latest virus patterns, while the Ontrack product just required that I press the "live update" button.