I just installed the 30-day trial of Norton AV 2012 but am not going to create a "Norton Account." Has anyone found a way to disable that nag? That should be totally optional. If there isn't a work around this AV is going in the toilet.
Norton / McAfee are the worst thing you could to to a PC! Get a real antivirus or security suite such as Kaspersky Internet Security! Like seriously, do you ever google or read virus comparative tests?
There are removal tool for all Anti viral .. Ur best bet is not use Norton ,it is a pain to rid it from ur PC or lappy .
Yes. And each of them says something different, and each program scores differently in different categories, (of course). If you look at VB100 you'd pick ESET. If you look at AV Comparatives, you'd pick Symantec, BitDefender or Kapersky, etc. Some programs block well, but don't clean well. Some clean well, but don't detect as well... Some, like Kapersky, are reported to be slow. But overall and generally speaking, it seemed that Symantec, BitDefender and Kapersky were the top rated ones at the moment, with Symantec out ahead with perfect scores on nearly all fronts. Yet if you read PC Magazine's testing of the top-rated AVs (top-rated according to the labs), you'll see Kapersky and BitDefender didn't do so well in their tests, but Symantec did and was an Editor's Choice along with Webroot, which did rather average in the labs. Anecdotal? Maybe. I tried Symantec once back in the early 90s and disliked it. It screwed up my system and I had a bear of a time getting rid of it. I used ESET then for years but it started creating problems on my system, hanging when I would download something as it scanned it. I also noticed AVAST was #1 at that time, so I switched to that. But it's slipped a bit. Depending on what you read, it scores average or better on most tests. (Again, PC Magazine reviewed AVAST 7 about 10 days ago and gave it 4 of 5 stars... it rates high in some areas but in detection it is only average.) So yes. I tried Symantec but I don't blame you for your attitude about it b/c I always disliked Norton myself. And I don't like Symantec AV for a whole list of reasons aside from it being a Norton product and requiring an account. No progress bar while scanning... takes several clicks to get to a screen where you can manage the files it finds, or even see the actual file name and path, poor configuration controls imho, etc. So while it might be a good AV product-wise, I am not happy with it. I may look into it's free OD scanner to use monthly along with my other monthly OD scanners, but I doubt I will be using it as my real time scanner, though if there was a workaround for the creation of the Norton Account, that would have figured into my decision.
Yeah, I saw the removal tool online, which tells you something already about the product, that it requires a special removal tool. But I backed up my laptop before the installation, anticipating this, so if I was not happy with it, I could restore my drive before Symantec was ever installed, rather than mess with uninstalling it.
Well, I uninstalled Symantec and I must say at least this much: the AV 2012 uninstalls cleanly by using the standard Windows uninstall programs window. I looked up the Norton uninstall tool first, but it is for Norton products 2003-2011. So I went the standard route and it was quite easy and did a shockingly good job. I used CCleaner afterward, and it found just 4 dangling reg references, which it cleaned up. I navigated to the Programs(86x) folder and also Users/AppData folders, and nothing remained that I could find. So they at least get a good score on that account.