Norton has left the building...

[ffutures]

As mentioned a while ago my Norton anti-virus subscription ran out on Wednesday (a little earlier than I'd thought, in fact) and I have now uninstalled it and gone over to AVG.

As expected, given my experience on my other PC, the first result is a general performance increase - not huge, but noticable - and a BIG improvement if I want to run other programs while a whole-system anti-virus scan is in progress; loading time is maybe a quarter what it was with Norton. Mail delivery and receipt also seems a little faster. I know that the down-side to this is said to be an occasional false positive, but so far there's nothing, and there never has been on the other PC.

I probably will go over to the paid version of AVG eventually, but for now I'm finding that the free one works pretty well. So Norton's bloatware approach has lost them yet another customer and saved me £25 a year, or whatever the current Norton renewal fee is.

Comments

[hasturcubed.livejournal.com]

Make sure to download and run Symantec's SymNRT (http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/tsgeninfo.nsf/docid/2005033108162039). The various incarnations of Norton's Utilities and Antivirus are infamous for not completely removing themselves when you uninstall them. Use this and you'll save yourself a lot of headaches down the road.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Many thanks - there were indeed some bits left, e.g. the scheduler.

[onyxhawke.livejournal.com]

Another really good one is Avast.

www.avast.com

This one lets you run boot time scans that will remove things some AV programs can't get out while the system is fully running.