Author Topic: Note for Norton AV Owners  (Read 8279 times)

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Kamil

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Note for Norton AV Owners
« on: March 03, 2003, 04:29:22 PM »
ALWIL's avast! 4.0 Home Edition is a good product, one I recently recommended to readers of the California Computer News.

It would be wise, however, to have ALWIL include a special and prominent notice to former Norton AntiVirus users that they first download and install the NAV "removal tool" from Symantec before installing avast! on their PCs.  I think that this would save everyone many unnecessary headaches.


Offline Vlk

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Re:Note for Norton AV Owners
« Reply #1 on: March 03, 2003, 04:39:23 PM »
Yes, you're right. However, starting with version 4.0.172, there actually IS such a functionality in avast! Setup - it should warn you if it finds Norton Antivirus installed on the target machine...

Are you saying that mere uninstallation of Norton is not enough? I.e. that a special (more thorough) removal tool is needed??

We'd be grateful if you could provide us with as much information about this issue as possible.

Thanks,
Vlk
If at first you don't succeed, then skydiving's not for you.

Kamil

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Re:Note for Norton AV Owners
« Reply #2 on: March 03, 2003, 04:52:37 PM »
I was at the Symantec site, and they indicate that their uninstallation routine in "Control Panel" should be sufficient enough to remove NAV 2000/2001/2002.  However, if for some reason that does not remove the program software completely, they recommend the download of a special program (Rnav2003.exe removal utility).

I had heard conflicting things with respect to the uninstallation of NAV.  Some feel that "Control Panel" removes the software fully; others have claimed that the special "removal utility" is the most fastidious at clearing out the vestiges of the software and sparing users' headaches.

In any case, it would probably be best to recommend that former NAV users consider uninstalling that software before installing avast!

Kamil

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Re:Note for Norton AV Owners
« Reply #3 on: March 03, 2003, 05:06:02 PM »

AC

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Re:Note for Norton AV Owners
« Reply #4 on: April 03, 2003, 06:31:56 PM »
My experience with Windows XP and the Norton AV uninstall is that it's better to use the SymClean utility from Symantec to completly remove that (bad) AV product.  And it must be done before instaling the greastest AV solution: Avast!
Specialy when some other Symantec products are still in use (ex: Norton Utilities) at the target machine.
I've run into several freezing problems in machines where NAV suposedly was correctly unistalled (but it wasn't) by Windows uninstaller.

Have fun!
AC

Beerbreath

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Re:Note for Norton AV Owners
« Reply #5 on: April 03, 2003, 07:55:17 PM »
Avast! 4 http://www.avast.com/ is the best freeware antivirus according to the VB100 ratings (Win XP June 2002) and my personal experience. This newer freeware version offers automatic updates, e-mail scanning, easy gui and takes less resources than others I've tried. You can even select boot time scan and of course on demand by right clicking a file or folder.  I've yet to see a freeware AV prog with this kind of depth.

The main reason installation fails or systems freeze when using new AV programs is the inablility of the old ones to uninstall properly. I have had to dig up removal tools for Norton before anything would operate properly. http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/8d071816eedd7cac88256c0e005a96e5/33497f6e8a319ece88256ace0076cc02?OpenDocument   Kaspersky, McAfee and even Grisoft (e-mail plug-in) have their own unique uninstall issues as well. For those of us that are unconfortable walking through windows registry and deleating the many left behind entries, there is some good registry cleaners available to aid in complete removal of these.

Reg Cleaner is a good free one. http://www.vtoy.fi/jv16/shtml/regcleaner.shtml

As with all registry adjustments - BACKUP BACKUP BACKUP! just in case.