This blog is primarily concerned with NIS 2007 (and a bit on NIS 08). I have nothing to say about more recent versions.

This blog is more or less dormant (except for occasional comments on related news), and is being left on-line as a historical record and perhaps as a warning to future generations of anti-virus coders.

2008-10-06

Symantec removed from laptop

Well, end of an era. Good bye Norton aka Symantec.

Last evening I removed NIS 08 from the laptop. That's the last of the three PCs around here.

Something of amusing interest was noted during this process.

I had downloaded the Norton Removal Tool (NRT) and the latest version of AVG. I then took the precaution of rebooting, was disconnected from the Internet, and then ran NRT. It uninstalled all the Symantec rubbish fine so far as I can see.

(But I haven't run a Registry Checker, such as CCleaner, to see if it cleaned up properly. Last time, on my XP desktop, NRT left 88 items of junk that needed to be cleaned up.)

Anyway - I then rebooted to have a clean start and installed AVG (which also went smoothly).

Amusingly, AVG identified 5 "infections" when it ran the first scan (see screen capture below).

[Note - I intentionally used the word "infections" in quotes because I knew at the time that these five files were probably not active in any way. But still, why would Symantec leave them hanging around? Do these files have any positive benefit for humanity? Delete, or quarantine, the friggen things...]

This after the laptop having been protected by NIS 08 for all this time. Makes one wonder...

By the way, it is nice how fast AVG is able to check for updates. Their update algorithm appears to be about 30 times faster than Symantec's patented 46-file method.


Five "infections" found by AVG (missed by NIS 08?):

No comments: