Chuck, my experience with Norton is eerily similar to yours, right
down to the removal problems. I still have remnants.
Out of the desperation born of fear, I checked online reviews and
subsequently purchased McAfee's VirusScan 2005. It had the highest
overall scores and with a CompUSA coupon was almost free. It
installed easily, updated via Web relatively quickly and promptly took
over my computer. It slowed to a crawl, particularly with any task
related to the Internet. I had a sense of McAfee interrupting every
event that occurred on my system and minutely examining it for
trouble. It was agonizing so I turned it off.
Now, every Saturday morning, between doing my 'Honey-do' list, I
download updates from Spybot, Ad-Aware Personal and McAfee, reboot to
safe mode and run 'em all, in that order. Spybot always finds some
junk, Ad-Aware finds negligible items and, after the initial run
during which it found stuff Norton never found, McAfee finds nothing.
When I think about all the time and money we have to waste to clean up
and protect ourselves from the pranks of a few fools, I am less than
happy. But then what can we expect from a$$holes?
my two lux worth/ScottGee1
On 6/13/06, Chuck Norcutt <chucknorcutt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I concur. I refuse to use either and also choose AVG. I don't use
> McAfee since it was what I was required to use at work in two different
> places. It was so long that I can't recall the circumstances but McAfee
> did something truly stupid that caused us much anguish.
>
> I was for many years a faithful user of Norton Anti-Virus up to Norton
> SystemWorks 2001. As a former IBM employee I used IBM anti-virus until
> IBM sold the group off to Symantec and they combined forces. It was
> natural to continue using Norton from that point. Then one day my
> daughter complained about Norton causing problems on her Win98 system.
> I asusmed it was Win98 specific trouble and the next time I visited her
> I tried to remove it. I could not. Lots of digging at Symantec showed
> this was not an isolated incident and I downloaded pages and pages of
> special manual removal instructions. After going through it all there
> was still something somewhere in some sort of auto start list causing
> problems. Probably config.sys or some such but my DOS skills were too
> rusty to trace it down.
>
> Later on, when I tried to renew my anti-virus subscription for
> SystemWorks 2001 Symantec advised me the program was no longer supported
> and I would have to upgrade at a higher cost than what I'd paid in the
> first place. At that point I decided I'd look around to see what was
> available and someone here (maybe Simon?) recommended AVG. So I
> downloaded AVG and figured I'd better remove SystemWorks 2001. Hah!
> Just try it! I ran into the same kind of stuff on my Win 2000 machine
> as my daughter's Win 98 machine. No matter what I did (including
> following Symantec's long winded manual removal instructions) I couldn't
> get it all out. I finally resorted to manually searching the registry
> for anything that looked even remotely related. I'm still not sure I
> got it all. As a former software development guy I'm suspicious that
> Symantec outsourced to someplace cheap and sent the QC group packing.
>
> Anyhow, Symantec and McAfee are not my friends. I'll stick with AVG.
>
> Chuck Norcutt
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