At last!

[DaveB]

That's the point mate. AV is such a huge industry these days, you can't just survive being a 'name'. Teams of 'experts' throw umpteen types of viruses at the current AV progs available then publish what they find. Some will stop more than others.. others are better at getting rid of what it's found.. it's a nightmare to be honest The best you can do is go with what you need for the best price and hope to god it's as good as the experts say it is. If the best price is 'free'.. that'll do me fine

Incidentally, while Ben said he used MSE on his pc at home.. to be on the safer side of safe, he uses something rather more robust to protect the forum. I don't think there's anything wrong with MSE.. more that the level of security offered by what he uses here is up at the top end as the forum is potentially at greater risk of attack

Eric.. AV progs don't like co-existing as far as I know. One will try and kill the other off if that makes sense. What I'd do is download MSE first without executing it.. remove Norton (if you can!!) going through a couple of reboots (I believe it's better to uninstall it using the disc rather than from add/remove progs but I wouldn't swear to it).. then, once happy that Norton has finally gone.. get ready to reconnect to the internet and execute the MSE exe file. That's the way I did it on this pc when I changed from Kaspersky

ATB
DaveB

[Tomliner]

Dave,that more or less in essence is what I was thinking.D/L but not execute MSE until running Norton' removal tool,which AFAIK does totally delete their prog.I have used their removal tool previously prior to doing an update to their Internet Protection.More recently,updating their software doesn't require the prior removal of the earlier edition. EricT

[DaveB]

Rgr that mate There used to be 2 parts to is as I remember.. the AV prog itself plus 'LiveUpdate'. If you removed the wrong one first, it was a devil to get rid of the other. Norton probably found this themselves hence the 'removal tool'. The only other alternative was to put the original disc in and remove it using the disc.

Good luck with it
ATB
DaveB

[TSR2]

Hi chaps,

The removal tool can be downloaded here. Don't be tempted to get it from anywhere else as these can often be booby-trapped with a virus.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/norton- ... on=current.

MSE does what it needs to do pretty well. OK, so there are no bells and whistles with it, but its free and works well. The only thing I would say is that if you go poking in grey areas of the internet, it may not be robust enough, but for normal use its great.

[NigelC]

Absolutely, MSE just chugs along in the background but is effective. As soon as I installed it, it picked something up that Norton had missed.

As I said, I had used BitDefender for about 4 years and a few weeks ago the subscription ran out and I was having ideas already about a full re-install of the PC to make it more FSX friendly. I didn't renew BD as pennies are a bit tight at the mo, and a seemingly good idea just didn't work out for me. If I hadn't stripped back to bare bones, I would not have used that CD and therefore wouldn't have found Norton.

Anyway, gone now, running MSE, also have the Microsoft Support Emergency Response Tool and Malicious Software Removal Tool to hand. As Dave said earlier, who better to protect your OS than the people who built it.

N