Lee's Blog

Norton Internet Security came with this computer, just like Vista did. I haven’t been hating Vista too much lately, because I somehow managed to get it to deal with the two monitors properly (I have no idea how). But I do hate NIS.

For one thing, it crashed the computer if the scheduled scan started up while I was doing … something. I don’t know what. It wasn’t just being online, but that was part of it. At any rate, it was causing the computer to crash several times a week. But I can live with that. I probably spend too much time online anyway.

Yesterday, NIS updated itself. Cool. Maybe it won’t cause crashes anymore.

Well, it didn’t cause crashes. That is a true statement. It did, however, hang. It would scan 7634 files and then go into an infinite loop. It would not stop the scan, though it had a stop button and it asked if I really wanted to stop. It could not be shut down. I finally had to reboot the computer to get it to stop running the hard drive.

This morning, I told it to do a complete scan. It scanned 7634 files and then went into a loop. Okay, I’ll be fair. Maybe it just needed more time. So I went to work. When I came back ten hours later, it was still scanning the same file for the same virus. And it wouldn’t shut down. Time to reboot again.

At this point I was completely disgusted and decided to uninstall it. Ha, ha. The uninstall program hung. It wouldn’t progress and wouldn’t shut down. Great. Reboot the computer again. Oh, look, the computer won’t shut down either! I had to shut it down by holding down the power button. I was about to turn off the surge suppressor when it finally gave up.

When I rebooted the computer, NIS was still there.

I tried to kill NIS with the TaskManager. Access denied. I tried to stop the service. Access denied. What do you mean, “access denied”? It’s my machine. I’m the administrator. If I want to kill a service, that’s my prerogative. Snarl.

NIS had a button to send you to Norton Account. Maybe this would help? This wanted me to log in with my email and password. What password? I didn’t remember any password. But fortunately there was a button to click if you forgot your password. Or rather, it would be fortunate if the button actually did anything! Which it didn’t.

I got to Norton’s website and gave them some feedback on their on-line form. They had a place to indicate how likely you were to recommend their product. The lowest rating was 1 out 10, so unfortunately I couldn’t give it a negative rating. I don’t dislike anyone enough to recommend Norton to them.

It eventually occurred to me to google for “uninstall norton internet security”. I was thinking in terms of an anti-virus program to remove the virus that is NIS, but actually this took me to Norton’s own uninstall utility which, for reasons that escape me, apparently isn’t supplied with the program. Perhaps they think no matter how useless their program, you won’t uninstall it if it takes hours to do so. This does not seem like a good business decision to me, but YMMV.

Anyway, after a couple of hours of increasing frustration, I have successfully removed NIS from my machine. At least, I’m pretty sure I have — I don’t see any traces of it.