Nortons
Author
Discussion

ChrisRS

Original Poster:

1,787 posts

248 months

Wednesday 28th February 2007
quotequote all
It's coming off!

Laptop came with a free copy of Nortons, thing is it seems to want 50% of my Laptop's power just to run it, i've heared it's a right pain in the rear to complety it so has anyone got any advice, i've also got Nortons Ghoast which i'd like to remove.

Once this is sorted, what's the best alternative to Nortons, i only use the Laptop for brousing the internet and music, all my proper downloading is done on a spare sacrificial machine.

Any advice is welcome.

ChrisRS

roadsweeper

3,789 posts

305 months

Wednesday 28th February 2007
quotequote all
Nearly everyone I have spoken to hates Norton. It seems to cause more problems than it cures.

Trend Micro PC-cillin used to be excellent and very good value, but the 2007 version is bloatware IMO.

AVG and Avast! both have free versions and are OK.

Sophos is quite good, but I think it's better suited for business use and servers.

My personal choice (I have direct experience of all the above solutions) would be Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 6.0 which is efficient, has very fast virus definition updates and comes with firewall, etc. It's about £25 from amazon.co.uk. I recently removed Norton from a client's laptop (after running a full system scan with Norton in safe mode and finding nothing), installed Kaspersky and ran a system scan and it found 3 viruses and various threats Norton had missed... :thumbdown:

ChrisRS

Original Poster:

1,787 posts

248 months

Wednesday 28th February 2007
quotequote all
roadsweeper said:
Nearly everyone I have spoken to hates Norton. It seems to cause more problems than it cures.

Trend Micro PC-cillin used to be excellent and very good value, but the 2007 version is bloatware IMO.

AVG and Avast! both have free versions and are OK.

Sophos is quite good, but I think it's better suited for business use and servers.

My personal choice (I have direct experience of all the above solutions) would be Kaspersky Internet Security Suite 6.0 which is efficient, has very fast virus definition updates and comes with firewall, etc. It's about £25 from amazon.co.uk. I recently removed Norton from a client's laptop (after running a full system scan with Norton in safe mode and finding nothing), installed Kaspersky and ran a system scan and it found 3 viruses and various threats Norton had missed... :thumbdown:



Did you just remove it using "Remove programs" or is there other stuff you have to remove manualy, heard it isn't the most user friendly piece of software to shift!

ChrisRS

TUS 373

5,237 posts

312 months

Wednesday 28th February 2007
quotequote all
Same issue I had with a new laptop. You buy something new generation and high end in processor and memory, only for bloody Norton to hog it!

I will vouch for Avast antivirus - it is free and not resource hungry at all.

For clean up of traces of programs left behind, I can really recommend CCleaner available free from www.ccleaner.com/ . It does a very nice job of keeping your PC clean of bits and pieces of programs that have been taken off. 5 start recomendation in my book and I only know about it because it was recommended on here a couple of years ago.

howmanlass

208 posts

241 months

Wednesday 28th February 2007
quotequote all
I've used both AVG freeby version and NOD32, haven't had any problems with either.

Teppic

8,096 posts

288 months

Wednesday 28th February 2007
quotequote all
To remove it you can run the Norton Removal Tool available from Symantec themselves!

Linky: http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/

roadsweeper

3,789 posts

305 months

Thursday 1st March 2007
quotequote all
Teppic said:
To remove it you can run the Norton Removal Tool available from Symantec themselves!

Linky: http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/


Aye, amazing isn't it that the Windows Add/Remove program doesn't remove it, yet Norton provide a program to remove it that they could easily add to the Norton uninstall routine. The whole product just shouts bloatware to me.