MS AS & Spybot S&D vs. Norton?

[blind34_1]

Alright, I'll break my 5-month forum sabbatical to put in my two-cents...

That seems a bit excessive on Norton's part...but not really surprising. Basically, Norton is telling you "I am all you'll ever need, so delete these other programs because I don't know how to co-exist..."

Now people may jump all over me for this, but I'll give my opinion.

My opinion is Symantec's antivirus and security products suck. I've given them chance and chance again. Poorly coded programs coupled with obscenely high memory usage has made me dump my subscription and never look back. It's inability to remove most spyware and other infections helped my decision also.

I currently use AVG 7.5 (free), and have had no virus issues. I run a spyware scan every couple of months or so using a-squared (free), and have nothing more than cookies. These are my results. Yours may vary.

On my laptop, I use NOD32 from Eset. This is very impressive, although not free. For the money, this is an impressive piece of software, and blows Norton out of the water. It does what it does extremely well. It would be worth looking into.

I would also say reinstall microsoft's defender software (or anti-spyware, if you like the old version), for its background services. If you find it works for you, by all means reinstall it. As I said, I do not use it, as I don't seem to have the same malware issues as others have.

Good luck.

[GT40FIED]

Thanks Aaron. I pretty much feel the same way about Norton. I'm so sick of their bullshit. What I particularly love is when they give you the old "You've got a virus, but you AV software can't fix it" message or when my simple (and free) software picks up shit that their shitty and overpriced stuff can't detect. As long as there aren't any command line conflicts or anything I might try reinstalling. Worse comes to worse I can always run safe mode and delete what I need to.