When she deposited her PC with us, we were quite surprised to find that a
current version of Norton Internet Security was installed, completely up to date
with the latest virus definitions. As soon as the PC booted, Norton popped up
alerts indicating that a Trojan Horse had been found and that (rather
unhelpfully) it could not be removed. Fat lot of use we thought! We have had
experience in the past with some of the larger AV companies (ones that seem to
have larger advertising than development budgets) detecting viruses and then
just not being able to do anything with them. The first course of action was to
do a diagnostic mode boot (or safe mode) which prevents all start up programs
from running. This can often stop a virus loading into memory allowing its
removal. However, when we did this, Norton would not actually perform a scan a
scan because some of its own components were not loaded! Once again – fat lot of
use!
One of our favorite ways of getting rid of a virus that is preventing a
machine from booting properly is to whip out the hard drive and install it as a
slave in one of our workshop machines. We did this, but could not get Windows to
recognize the drive. We found that this was because Norton GoBack was installed.
This re-writes the master boot record of the drive making it unusable unless you
actually boot from that drive. At this stage it really did seem that Norton was
actually getting in the way of us removing the viruses – not helping us at
all!
Next course of action – we removed Norton Internet Security and Norton
GoBack. This took an age because the machine was running like a dog. Then, we
installed the Free version of AVG AntiVirus which is quite acceptable because it
was a home users machine. We then booted into Safe Mode, did an AVG scan, and
hey presto, all of the viruses were gone.
Now, we know for a fact that if the machine had AVG installed from the day it
was purchased, those viruses would not have even been on it. We also know from
experience that AVG can remove viruses that Norton cannot. AVG also uses less
memory and just does its job without getting in the way (the customer had
described Norton as ‘a pain in the arse’ because of all the ‘silly boxes it pops
up all the time’). We just fail to see why a company that obviously has an
enormous advertising budget can produce a product that just doesn’t do what it
is meant to.
Obviously any antivirus protection is better than none. We would just say
that those customers that are using AVG antivirus either do not get viruses or
if one creeps through, it can be removed 100% of the time. The same just cannot
be said for other, more ‘popular’ products. We have described Norton in this
example – this is purely because that is what was on the customers’ machine. We
have exactly the same concerns regarding several of the ‘big advertising budget’
developers as well.