Killing Off Antivirus

Posted on June 24th, 2008 | by Chris Nixon |

After reading this post questioning whether antivirus software was a virus in itself, I was prompted to let you know my experience.

A few weeks ago, a guy at work came into the office and asked me to help him speed up his computer. This first thing I did was try and remove Norton Antivirus. I’ve always found this to be a horrible resource hog, and there are better solutions available for free.

No matter what I tried, the PC wouldn’t let me uninstall any part of the software until other parts of the software were removed first. Classic malware behavior. Eventually I gave up and looked for a solution on their website. It turns out their Norton Antivirus Removal Tool is the most downloaded software on their site. I’ll let you make your own judgements about that.

After about half an hour I managed to get every last trace of the software off his PC, and got a huge increase in performance.

Forward three weeks…I get a phone call from my colleage saying he is now getting bullying pop-ups from Norton on his PC telling him to update his Norton Antivirus. What a disgrace! The only solution left in my armoury was a fresh install of XP.

In my opinion viruses are a scare tactic used by big software companies to peddle their wares. Do me a favour and follow this advice.

  1. Don’t install big-name antivirus software. Stick to something like AVG.
  2. Don’t visit dodgy web sites….you know the ones.
  3. Don’t open dodgy email attachments.

If the worst comes to the worst and you still get a virus after all that, you can be safe in the knowledge that it won’t be as bad as having antivirus software killing your PC.

Alternatively…buy a Mac.

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