Norton 360 Is a Virus

Okay, my friend bought a new laptop last week. He needs Internet Explorer for his work, because that is the only thing that the web applications he uses support.

I will spare you the whole Windows Vista rant (it isn't that bad, just slow) but as you would expect it came with a ton of junk installed on it, including a 90 day trial of Norton 360 (antivirus, firewall etc etc). Every time I booted the machine up, it would come up and ask for me to register for my free trial, but there was no way to quit out of it. I finally got the the license agreement screen, declined to agree, and it then quit. I uninstalled it.

I found then that Internet Explorer was the only application that could access the internet. Firefox, iTunes didn't work.

I stayed up to midnight last night trying to figure this out. I found a reference to a Norton Removal Tool, which I couldn't download from Symantec's web site because Internet Explorer had quit allowing me to download stuff.

I had to download it on my Mac, copied it to a flash drive and then ran it on my friend's laptop. It removed some stuff, and then everything worked again.

I pity someone who has little or no understanding of how computers work. They are so screwed in this situation. Here is a piece of software that is supposed to protect a computer from hacking, and uninstalling it screws the computer up. It behaves like a virus.

Oh, and one last thing. I fished through the box to find the restore CD for this laptop, and there isn't one. It seems that this is pretty common now. What are you supposed to do when the machine gets really screwed up (this is windows we are talking about) or when the HD fails? In the case of an HD failure -- am I correct in assuming that what happens is the user has to buy a new Windows license in addition to the new harddrive? It is almost like the manufacturers are encouraging people to either throw away the laptop (by the time the HD fails, the laptop will be almost worth the price of a Windows Vista License and HD) or install a different operating system on it (which is exactly what I would do).