The great PC Security protection scam :
Norton started out life on the mac and was a great program way back under Macos 7 – 8, it then migrated to the pc to make more money, larger user base etc, since then it has evolved into the take over your machine evil bloatware that it now is, if you have the ubiquitous free trial installed on your machine, don’t install it remove it, trust me when I say that modern norton will reduce the speed of your machine by a third in effective terms and worse if you take into account all the endless dialogs it will make you click on, before it will allow anything to occur on your PC, in fact its worse than that, as when your computer isn’t doing something youve asked it to do and is waiting for you to click on an I allow/approve/ok/trust dialog, then in reality your machine, from a doing what you want it to do perspective, is effectively running at 0 Mhz. Theyre are many other suitable programs to run instead, or even operating systems ubuntu etc.
But the general rule on a PC to be safe is, just don’t be an idiot. ie … I hope people are truly aware now, that all software, web pages, dialogs may, can and will lie to you, at some point, to elicit a behaviour from a user, that is financially advantageous, from third party corporate and vested interest perspective, not all is what it seems, when the web advert says your computer is infected, click here to clean your system, that advert is the enemy, if only software could actually scan all the files on your machine the speed at which those false antvirus web adverts do, unfortunately back in the real world checking every file on your hard drive for a virus might take 3 hours. They are lying in order to get money from you, the truth is your best protection from, websites, viruses, operating system behaviours (the difficulty of changing search provider in explorer, is a great example), emails also, its best to be as sceptical as you possibly can i’m afraid, trust no-one, not even the software that dresses up as the Knight in shining armour, to convince you its on your side. To some extent don’t rely on even trusting my words here, im a third party you dont know me from adam ? but truthfully I have no financial interest in lying to you. Trust only what your own experience has taught you, or trust the experience of others who’ve learnt the hard way that your prepared to risk trusting.
I decided to write this article as I waited for Norton to do a complete uninstall, first of all unless you attempt to un-install the main program first it will flat out refuse to uninstall its other components, that you try to uninstall, and then over an hour and a half later using its own uninstaller accessed from attempting to uninstall the main program , and with the petrol gauge at its end and full, it doesn’t finish or close itself properly, I couldn’t wait any longer … I restarted … I pondered had it removed itself ? the answer … NO! , and in truth why would it have done, these corporate ones have no interest in you escaping theyre clutches, so would they write the software that removes itself well enough, that it would succeed at removing itself ? OF course NOT that would ruin the chance of them having you as part of their revenue stream at some point in the future.
Much better to pretend its removing itself by running a petrol gauge timer that does nothing and and wait for the user to be tired of waiting for the uninstaller to succeed and just give up. It so desperately wants to continue to run on your computer it fails to un-install itself, like some crazy paranoid girlfriend who wont leave even when you tell her to, she’s not welcome at the party but she remains like a spectre at the feast. So that in a months time she can nag you about the subscription renewal she insists on you paying for otherwise she sulks and does nothing, while in the meantime this protection she offers is just sucking the very life out of your computer.
You dont need norton, she wasnt really interested in helping you she was just interested in milking you and pretending theyre was some enormous threat out there that meant you needed her, kick her to the curb once and for all. For me I will do my usual routine as with most PC’s its actually quicker for me to reformat the machine and do a slipstream install of an trimmed operating system, than it is to uninstall and salvage an operating system thats pimped out by evil software, but thats a tip for another day.
by the way norton have written a norton removal tool to remove their software ?!?!?! but its a seperate download you have to know about, before you can get rid of it : so here … im informing you … click below to download : yuo certainly wont find installed with their software !
probably the best bit of software they now make.
The solution ? Go for the free alternatives which don’t run tons of background processes like :
Adaware Free if that doesn’t cure your problems.
and if you suspect a virus, then run a trial standalone version of either :
AVG antivirus or Kapersky antivirus, do not get bamboozled into trial pay whoredom, or full on suites of anything they will all muller your machine, just get the standalone trial that only runs on your machine when you instruct it too. if you need to use it again and its run out then do a full uninstall and try another trial of the same or other product.
Pro PC users will rarely allow any of this bloatware protection software to run on their machines, if you are the type of person that downloads allot of dodgy stuff, then you will have to have some sort of software to clean your machine once in a while, just like someone who does allot of sexual networking, should visit a sexual health clinic. Personally I tend to wait for the first sign of trouble, one corrupt file, sluggishness, wierd behaviour etc, and act on it immediately, rather than run something in the background that ruins my whole computing experience, windows firewall and windows security software included in that equation. In vista you can barely dispose of these annoyances your probably better of with XP or Windows Seven in this respect.
and best of all dont be an idiot and click on weird dialogs adverts or sign up for bullshit websites, stay suspicious of all things and you will be safer, without the corporate background process hogs of bloatware pain.