I am the sys admin for my wife’s PC. She’s a non-techie scholar who uses her computer for email, occasional browsing, and just about nothing else. So, it’s a straightforward job keeping it up and running. But yesterday I was on the verge of switching her to Linux. All because of Norton Antivirus.

What an arrogant piece of sw NAV is.

Yesterday my wife started getting error messages I haven’t seen in my twenty years of owning Windows machines. The desktop would only barely load and no apps would run. Guessing that it was Norton, I tried to use the Windows Add/Remove facility. It refused to uninstall Norton. So, I booted into Safe Mode as an administrator, but Norton will not uninstall itself in Safe mode.

So, I went through Norton’s instructions for manually uninstalling and removed the 2,035 places Norton writes itself into the Registry and the 367,222 directories Norton strews about your desktop.

But Norton Antivirus is like sand on a beach: Days later you’re still finding it in crevices you didn’t know you had.

As of last night my wife is using Grisoft AVG, the antivirus software I’ve been using on my computer for years. It’s simple. It works. It doesn’t think that it owns your machine. And there’s even a fully functional free version. But at $40 for two years, it’s worth every penny.

I should probably switch my wife to Linux anyway. [Tags: norton grisoft avg antivirus virus whines]

Categories: Uncategorized dw