Evil, evil Norton

Thursday, 12:47 pm

By Kate

Aug

04

2005

Yesterday afternoon the lad cleaned out his desk and found his Best Buy gift certificate that has been in hiding since Christmas. What treasures a good desk and bedroom cleaning can uncover, eh?

Naturally after exclaiming in delight, the next words out of his mouth were, “Could we go to Best Buy tonight?”

As he well knows, that’s my second favorite haunt after the book store. So yes, we went to Best Buy. He went about his business and I headed for the software section. I wanted something to replace Norton SystemWorks. Something that would do all the maintenance chores without taking over my whole computer and foisting a virus protection subscription service off on me.

I should have asked this before I did it—since I’ve been messing around all morning cleaning out my computer, trying to uninstall Norton SystemWorks—is it possible to ever get rid of every last vestige of that software? I keep finding bits and pieces and I’m sure there are a hundreds more bits and pieces in the registry, even though it supposedly uninstalled. I think Norton SystemWorks takes over the entire computer when it is installed, never to be gotten rid of or properly killed. It becomes the boss and even tells Windows what hoops to jump through.

Now I am having all sorts of problems. With the new software installed—System Mechanic 5—things are not running smoothly. Freeze, freeze, freeze, crash, crash, crash. I’m still getting interference from Norton SystemWorks. There is something left in there that doesn’t want to let System Mechanic 5 do its job or my computer do its job. It’s frustrating me to death. I’m still getting little SystemWorks pop up alarms that should be GONE. Whatever is left in there is in panic mode and has reduced my computer to a barest of bones operation.

I’m beginning to hear “reformat hard drive” in my head. I am so disgusted.

Oh, the lad bought himself a a couple of computer games. His morning has been a lot more fun than mine.