Posted on 10/24/2006 6:47:46 PM PDT by Swordmaker
"When you have a few minutes," my father asked me on the phone last night, "could you help me with my antivirus stuff?" The trial version of Norton AntiVirus 2006 on his three-month-old Lenovo laptop was expiring, and he was bit confused by the upgrade warning, so he wanted me to help him through the transition. One of the options was to upgrade to Norton AntiVirus 2007, for $39 (after the $10 promotional coupon he got in e-mail). Sounded good to me.
"Sure," I said. "It should only take a few minutes." I took control of his computer via LogMeIn and set to work.
Nearly an hour and a half later, hungry and irritated, I hung up and disconnected. The upgrade was complete. My father said, "I could not have done this without you." He was right, and that's why I was mad.
The upgrade required a complete uninstallation of the the 2006 product, which took a good 10 or 15 minutes and required a reboot. The download and installation of the 2007 version took nearly an hour itself and required its own reboot. It also asked for registration information that duplicated the info my father had given when he bought the new software online, leading him to think he was starting over. There were choices to make that he didn't understand and offers for products he didn't need. At several times during the process the computer appeared to be locked, and my father was tempted to turn it off and reboot. Before we said our good-byes, my bewildered father said to me, "Can't you write something about this? Make them change?"
So this is for you, Dad.
For everyone else: Nobody should have to deal with this. When the antivirus subscription that came with your PC expires, don't immediately jump to renew or upgrade what you have. There may be a better product out there. Also, the next time you're thinking of getting a new computer, take a serious look at the Macintosh.
Passed all tests with a perfect score when I had Norton running. Turned Norton off and it said I was vulnerable. Pretty interesting.
The Comodo Firewall yields me the same results as Nortons Internet Security, and is more user friendly.
OS 6 and OS X have about the same family relationship as your grandfather's dog and your wife's cat... none.
Any Mac version of Norton will do nothing to protect you from non-existent Mac viruses. If you want to prevent your machine from passing on any Windows viruses, then you can go ahead and renew and pay the Dane his Dane-geld... or you can run ClamXAV... or you can, like most Mac OS X users, go naked into the virtual world, unafraid, confident that your system is nigh unto bulletproof until someone finds a Mac OS X virus in the wild.
Thanks! That is what I thought from reading all these threads and that is what I will do. Any tips on uninstalling Norton? I will remove everything I see.
Start with the Add/Remove Applications option in the control pane. The one I had to remove for a client insisted that the computer had to be connected to the internet for it to remove Norton. Make sure you have exited from any Norton/Symantec product before attempting it. There are several components that need to be removed.
Afterwards, if you are feeling extremely brave, you can search the Registry for remnants... use RegEdit and search for anything "Norton" and "Symantec".... you will be surprised at how much is left.... delete any registry entries you find.
If you don't feel brave, you can leave them hanging around, sort of like ghosts of Norton Past...
Thanks. I have trashed Norton AntiVirus. I am not worried about the other diagnostic stuff since they don't interact with the daily operation of the computer, or do they?
Depends on whether they are running in the background or not. If they are, they can use system resources and give a performance hit.
One of my client's computers was as slow as mollasses in January... it was Norton's CPU usage monitor... it was taking a large percentage of the CPU time! I removed it and the system was snappy again.
bttt
bttt
How have you liked the AVG suite?
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