This came free for 2 months on my laptop and is about to run out. Is it worth forking out for or do people reckon free stuff is better/as good? And if so is it easy to get rid of the Norton stuff? From previous experience I'm not a big fan of Norton but thats because of their habit of renewing without asking:eek: rather than whether it works or not. I just use the laptop for Briskoda, email etc. no big downloads or games etc. Any advice ta.

Personally I would (well I did!) ditch Norton for the free stuff

Chris

i had a backdoor trojan recently,could not get rid ,mcafee didn't pick it up tried a few others, no good either,got avg for free,done the job ,all my mates use it too,they have for a while and swear by it.

I use AVG free edition too, also no problems. Think I got it from 'Grisoft'?

Much quicker at updates etc too.

I used to buy Norton annually for the 3 PCs in my household but saved a lot of money by switching to the free edition of AVG. I will never go back to Norton nor McAfee I used a while ago.

Looks like hello AVG goodbye Norton then, thanks everyone

Is it easy to get rid of the Norton stuff? .

There's a useful tool to get rid of it. I used it with no probs. Download from

Download and run the Norton Removal Tool

yep i ditched the Norton recently , it slowed my lappy down so much it was unreal , running AVG free now , as per recommendations from on here, had no problems with it

Norton is a turd.

Much better free progs are available as mentioned.

AVG or Avast

Zonealarm or Comodo (firewall)

Spyware Blaster

Adaware

Whats the best place to download AVG from? I only ask as I had a bad experience with a free spyware program years ago that turned out to be a fake!

I use Norton and have had no issues with it. All my programmes run fine with it and it has never crashed either. Only tonight I received an email which it (Norton) instructed me had contained a Trojan. It removed this automatically. I have never had a virus or Trojan etc (at least not that I know of) in all the years I have used Norton. It used to slow my PCs down noticeably, but my current laptop has a T7500 chip and it seems to run fine without serious slowing.

Another one here who now run AVG free after reading reports & opinions on here.

No problems to report & downloads are quick & easy.

AVG

AVG Free Advisor - Free antivirus and anti-spyware downloads

Avast

Free antivirus - avast! 4 Home Edition Download

Norton is shockingly bad! I am not even going to bother stating the obvious..

Have used AVG for almost 3 years and i have never had a problem with it. Its superb for free software!!

If you want to pay for an AV, NOD32 seems to be coming out top in all the reviews i have read recently.

Used to use norton, then moved to AVG free, but am now paying for kaperski because i find it uses less system resources.

Norton was a huge resource hog and I would never go there again.

I used to use the corporate versions of Norton rather then the home (tonka toy-looking) versions. However I now run Sophos Sweep on my main PC and NOD32 on my laptop. I prefer to have different scanners on each machine, just in case one virus scanner misses something, then *hopefully* the other machine will detect it....

Well I just removed Norton and downloaded AVG. so far so good but its only been an hour!

Got tired of waiting an age for XP to start with Norton .Ditched Norton , loaded up Zone Alarm and AVG --SO FAR SO GOOD . Kept Norton Systemworks tho --great for getting rid of problems .

I use

Avast - AV

Zonealarm - Firewall

Spyware Terminator - ASW

Why pay?

The cynnical in me says the best thing Norton protects against is users wanting to uninstall it

I switched to NOD32 after using AVG. No particular reason - I don't mind paying for it as it's not that expensive, and after recommending AVG to lots of friends, I became frustrated having to constantly explain how to setup checking on emails when you're not using Outlook

This came free for 2 months on my laptop and is about to run out. Is it worth forking out for or do people reckon free stuff is better/as good? And if so is it easy to get rid of the Norton stuff? From previous experience I'm not a big fan of Norton but thats because of their habit of renewing without asking:eek: rather than whether it works or not. I just use the laptop for Briskoda, email etc. no big downloads or games etc. Any advice ta.

Hi Musky,

My son had the same thing with two months free Norton on his new laptop, and I think that this was referring to the anti virus bit first as this was disabled, with a request to take out anew contract after the two months.

I took Norton off of his laptop as it interfered with every programme that he tried to run, and blocked every thing. I found to be the absolute nightmare. I also found that it had the habit of renewing without asking. I do not like Norton because it is not very user friendly.

Lucky for me that I had still a contract with CA on my main PC which I am using for this message, and so it covers up to three PCs and so I loaded this on to my sons laptop. I found CA to be very good and also one of the cheapest, but when this one runs out I will be using one of the free versions that are available.

As regards the anti spy and anti spam not so critical stuff, then he now relys on the windows XP bit only.

Soviet junior downloads and plays a lot of games on his laptop, and he recently must have got hold of some bad software, as every time he used the wireless connection it would be disabled, and wipe out the IP address. Having a BT hub a collaborated with the Indian help desk to resolve the problem, which is free phone, and after 4 hours one evening we got the wireless working. But the next day on switching on the laptop the same problem occurred and the link could not be enabled, and I tried every thing that I know. So I backed up all the files, and wiped everything off and did a windows format type install, and then loaded all the drivers back on, and then put the wireless configuration back, and this has finally solved the problem. This was a bit time consuming, but there was really no alternative way to do this.

Having said all this, CA anti-virus did not pick up what was causing the problem, or neither did windows defender, anti spam etc.

So this is an interesting one, and I would like to hear if anyone else has ever experienced this problem of the wireless Ip address being disabled by malicious software.

Regards

Soviet:thumbup: