I'm with Harry on this. I've got to toss my $0.02 in here, and say that I
find modern Norton (and some other brands) AV products to have negative net
value as well.
What I have seen with family and friends is that running AV in the
background is a losing proposition.
Anecdote #1: My stepbrother used AV software, and still got a massive
virus infection. It even managed to corrupt the BIOS on his machine. I
spent a weekend fixing that one for him. To complicate matters, his CD
drive failed just as we were finishing the resurrection. The way in which
it failed made it seem that the machine crashed (BSOD and locked up) at an
arbitrary time. He was about ready to throw the machine (a nice one) in
the trash. I told him to buy a new CD drive, and all was well.
Anecdote #2: I had been hounding my stepmother for years to ditch all the
Norton gizmos she had on her CAD machine. It was a kick-butt machine (dual
CPU, 1GB RAM, SCSI, etc.). But every time I was asked to use it, it felt
like it was crawling and the hard disk was constantly thrashing. I knew
something was not right about it. But you know how it is with family -
sometimes they will believe anyone else before they believe you. All I
have is an EE degree and 18+ years of computer experience, and I design
embedded computers for a living. What could I possibly know about the
subject? Nope, their local air compressor tech who moonlights as a white
box builder and is drunk half the time must know more.
Then last year, they had a massive spyware infection. All of their Norton
gizmos didn't stop it from happening, and all their attempts at cleaning
the spyware off were to no avail. They fought that spyware for 2 months,
and finally gave up. The machine was unusable. It would boot up, but was
so slow and would crash within minutes. In desperation, they asked me to
fix it for them. I told them I would, on the condition that they let me do
it my way, not interfere with my work, and not ask questions until I'm
finished. I also told them I would save their data if possible, but some
of it may be lost forever. That's right, no backups existed. They said OK.
Here is how I resurrected their machine:
1) Attach brand new 250GB IDE drive to copy files onto
2) Since the boot sector was infested, I booted their machine from a
Knoppix Linux CD
3) Mounted all the existing drives, and copied all the data files from the
existing drives to the new drive
4) Power down and detach the new drive
5) Boot Knoppix again, and forceably invalidated the partition tables of
the existing drives
6) Booted W2K from installation CD, partitioned and formatted the existing
drives
7) Power down and attach the new drive
8) Booted Knoppix, scanned the new drive (saved data) for viruses. Found
some, cleaned or deleted infected files.
9) Booted W2K, copied cleaned files over to existing drives
10) Detached new drive
11) Booted W2K
12) Installed safer internet applications: Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.
13) Wrote detailed instructions on how *not* to get reinfected
14) Did *not* reinstall Norton gizmos
The machine was in surgery for 36 hours. The operation was a success, and
only 21 data files were lost to virus corruption. Fortunately, the lost
files did not seem to be that important. And the machine was faster than
it had ever been. I was now the family hero. Finally, some respect!
It's about 8 months later now, and the respect is starting to slip a bit.
Some of my recent technical opinions and advice have been scorned. I think
they may be falling back into their old ways. Last time I visited, they
had some silly toolbars and frivilous apps installed that I warned them
against. The machine is still running good, but seems a little slower than
when I left it. If I have to do another surgery marathon on their PC,
maybe I will charge them for it this time!
Best regards,
Ivan Baggett
Bagotronix Inc.
website: www.bagotronix.com
Harry Selfridge wrote:
I would second the suggestion to abandon the Norton software. I was one
of Peter Norton's first customers back in the good old DOS days. His
software was solid and did a few really useful jobs in DOS and early MS
Windows versions.
After he sold his stuff to Symantec, the products began to show quirky
behavior, and after a couple of years became the source of many problems
with Windows 3.1, 95 and 98. I eventually began recommending to anyone
who would listen, that the first thing to do when having consistent
crashes or lockups was UNINSTALL all Symantec products. That advice
fixed more computers than I can count.
I haven't used a Symantec/Norton product since, and I haven't missed
them. For anti-virus protection, there are alternatives such as McAfee
and Kaspersky that have caused me less grief than the years of fighting
with Symantec.
Harry Selfridge
Encore Engineering Services and Products
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