I’ve used Norton AntiVirus for years. My wife’s laptop was running AntiVirus 2003. Her subscription recently ran out, so, even though I’ve been thinking about checking out some other antivirus software, I decided to go ahead and upgrade her virus definitions subscription. While performing the update, I was given an opportunity to upgrade to AntiVirus 2007 for the same price as keeping 2003 and updating my virus definitions. So I thought, “why not?” Oh, brother…
The download and install process took over an hour. After it was all rolling, I decided to run a full system scan. I knew that would take forever, so I just set the laptop aside and let it run. When it was finished, I shut it down. The next day, the fun began. My wife told me her laptop (a Dell Inspiron 5100–not exactly a speed machine) was taking even longer than usual to start up and that Internet Explorer (which she uses to check her web-based email accounts) was taking several minutes to launch. She’d done two reboots, to no avail.
So I decided to check it out. And I found the same thing. The alreadly sluggish boot times were now two or three times as long. I got AntiVirus’s admin to launch and tried tweaking some settings and doing restarts for them to apply. Nothing mattered; it was clearly AntiVirus that was dragging the system down. But the system was so slow and unstable that I couldn’t–despite multiple attempts–get the control panel to launch. So i couldn’t uninstall Norton AntiVirus.
I posted a question to ask.metafilter.com, to see if anyone else had been having trouble or had any advice. They recomended starting in safe mode, which was a good idea. But it turns out that Norton AntiVirus can’t be uninstalled in safe mode. You get a nice little dialog box telling you that Norton AntiVirus relies on a component that’s not available in safe mode. What idiots. I was mad.
I launched back into normal mode and was finally able to get the add/remove programs control panel to open. It took about ten minutes to open and another five to populate. Pathetic. I uninstalled Norton AntiVirus and took some advice from a person in the thread and installed AVG Free. So far, I like it. It runs fine and doesn’t seem to eat up resoruces like Norton did. If it continues to work well, I’m going to uninstall Norton AntiVirus on my laptop and roll with this instead. I’ve also applied to Symantec for a refund. Though, as many hours as I’ve wasted fixing this problem, a refund won’t begin to recoup my losses. Still, it’ll help. I’ll update you on that, too.