I just had to rant about this. I got a laptop as a present a couple months back which I haven't messed around with much yet. I have winxp sp2 home on it and, like all non-OEM comps, it comes with a slew of pre-installed software, one of which is Norton Antivirus 2004. So I wanna uninstall it and put Avast on instead so I don't have to deal with that 60 day limit to free updates crap. And when I go into Norton's folder in the start menu, there is no uninstall. I go into Norton AV's physical folder in program files and no uninstall.exe of any kind in there either!! What the hell? Seriously, what kind of software does not come with its own uninstall utility?? :swear:
The laptop manufacturer has probably removed the Un-Install utility. Try doing a search for 'unins' without the quotes and see what comes up. It may be residing in the system32 folder or something similar.
I know! I told my parents, "wow! you guys spend too much money on me," and my mom answered, "well it's been a while since we got you a good present." lol. That may be true, but still this is as expensive as like 5-10 years worth of my previous birthday/christmas presents combined. I felt really spoiled lol. Anyway, yeah, of course I checked Add/remove programs thingy. But there are like 3 different entrees all associated with it which have "symantec corporation" in paranthesis. So I'll have to click remove on each of them in turn to get rid of it all. I just thought it's completely retarded it didn't come with its own uninstall utility to save me this hassle, hence the rant heh. ** Hey thats an interesting proposition, Pelvis. Maybe that is the cause. The uninstall file(s) could have also been permanently deleted, right? I tried searching as you suggested and it came up with a buch of strange files that had some prefix plus "uninst" in the name, many of them in the windows root folder but nothing that said clearly said nortonuninstall or something. If it's there, I can't tell by the names, since its all abbreviations like "spuninst" or something. *shrug
I have had this same problem on my compaq,It is even built into there recovery disks.. You have to setup Norton first in order to remove it.. I am like you,I don't care for Norton... Norton is a Virus in it self. Not to menton BLOAT Wear... It is very hard to get rid of,It is like ZoneAlarm.. you will have to go into the Registry and Manuallly remove all of Norton and the sysmatic crap.
Yes it's bloatware alright. It hijacks Windows Explorer and installs pointless toolbars and desktop tools. It slows the system down and eats up resources. And of course, once the free 6 month updates have expired, you are left with a product that can't protect from the latest threats.
To make sure you have got that Virus off your computer... Run this tool: Norton Removal Tool It will get every bit off of your PC.
Wow, seriously?? Damn, I had no idea it was this bad... ** Chris, how did u find that? U're going through the ftp instead of http... crazy. I tried just for fun to go to their webpage and clicked support, then searched for "uninstall" in the search. Their solution was this page, which just says to use add/remove in control panel but nothing about such a removal tool. What I thought was interesting was that it also said this: "Note: During the uninstall, Windows may note that it is installing software. This is a standard Microsoft installation message. This message can be ignored." Umm, wtf? Is that true? I don't remember ever getting a message about windows installing something after I told add/remove to uninstall something... Could that mean that it's installing other crap while removing the AV??
I have had to remove Norton from many people's computers, who were acting slow & infected So I found that after some googling - originally got it from soft-pedia. No, it won't install anything else, it's just a typical Microsoft error It tell's you to ignore it..
