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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 5:10 pm    Post subject: Opinions please... Reply with quote

I have a Dell Laptop shrubber. I am sure that most of you are aware of it. It helped me start actually climbing in the standings after I got it.

It came with Vista Home Premium on it. It was running fine up until last week. I had Norton 2007 installed on it and was very happy with it (same on my PC shrubber at home too). My subscription came with a free upgrade to Norton 2009. That's when the problems began. The upgrade never installed right. It would hang the laptop on the first boot every time. Norton would not even run scans. So I went to roll back to a restore point this afternoon.

Now things are even worse.

I have all the disks and can re-install everything back the way it was...OR..I can try to down-grade it back to XP SP3.

Windows will be staying on the laptop. I just would like your opinions as to which version I should put on.

Please note that the laptop is my best shrubber at home and whilst it is down I do not expect to be climbing in the standings. Not that I have been doing much climbing lately. I seem to have tied a large rock to my ankle while I was swimming in the deep ocean that is the Boinc standings.
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Yankton
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Joined: 27 Sep 2008
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 5:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

First off, Norton has a history of screwing up an OS. Historically, the best way to deal with it is uninstall Norton completely, erase all trace of it, make sure everything works, then you can try and re-install it.

Second, Vista uses a TON of resources. If you want to use the laptop to shrub, XP is a FAR superior choice, not to mention it's superior to vista anyway.

You could use a live linux distro (or dual boot) to shrub and boot into the regular windows for whatever else you use it for.

If you do make the wise choice of ditching vista, first go and collect all the XP drivers for your laptop so you can install everything properly when you upgrade to XP.
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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 5:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have the disk with the drivers that came with the laptop. So in theory I should be good with that.
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Yankton
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 6:07 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It came with the XP drivers and vista? That's odd. But if you don't have them you should be able to pull them from Dell's support site using model number (not service tag).
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KWSN imcrazynow
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 6:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You could go to nortons support site and select the chat button and let them sort it out for you. You can if you wish allow them to control the computer. Also on the other hand, on Nortons site is a removal tool. Have you tried it yet, It (sometimes) works well in the event of a bad upgrade.
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ohiomike
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 7:03 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

KWSN imcrazynow wrote:
You could go to nortons support site and select the chat button and let them sort it out for you. You can if you wish allow them to control the computer. Also on the other hand, on Nortons site is a removal tool. Have you tried it yet, It (sometimes) works well in the event of a bad upgrade.

It generally takes an act of god to remove Norton's stuff. If you run their removal tool, and then search for and delete all Norton and Symantec keys from your registry, and then run a registry repair tool- you MAY remove their software without having to format C: and re-install. I went through that once (and have used Avast ever since).
PS- Norton Utilities is WORSE than any virus I have ever come in contact with!
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KWSN imcrazynow
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 7:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ohiomike wrote:
KWSN imcrazynow wrote:
You could go to nortons support site and select the chat button and let them sort it out for you. You can if you wish allow them to control the computer. Also on the other hand, on Nortons site is a removal tool. Have you tried it yet, It (sometimes) works well in the event of a bad upgrade.

It generally takes an act of god to remove Norton's stuff. If you run their removal tool, and then search for and delete all Norton and Symantec keys from your registry, and then run a registry repair tool- you MAY remove their software without having to format C: and re-install. I went through that once (and have used Avast ever since).
PS- Norton Utilities is WORSE than any virus I have ever come in contact with!

Which brings me to another suggestion. If you switch OS and your system will support x64 Nortons will not work unless you go to their enterprise line. On the shrubber I built I installed XP Pro x64 and then found out IS200x would not work (I had service for 3 computers but only had 2 at the time). I then downloaded Avast for free. Free is the key. IF your laptop is the only one that runs Nortons then you may want to switch to Avast and get Symantic to refund your money and that can go to a OS upgrade if you wish.
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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Tue Nov 04, 2008 7:43 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

The Laptop (and PC) are both 32 bit machines and The PC already has Norton running on it.
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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Wed Nov 05, 2008 10:11 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is on the way. I have XP sp3 with all the updates installed. THat was an odessy to get that done today. I don't have the virus or spyware software on it yet. That will be tomorrow. So naturally I am on the laptop now checking the forum. Rolling Eyes

There (for the moment) seems to be a marked improvement in the performance of the PC. Not shrubbing yet either. After the smap and virus stuff.
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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 07, 2008 7:02 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I have Boinced the laptop. So far it is only shrubbing Milkyway and 3x+1. More to be added later on.
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KWSN imcrazynow
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 07, 2008 7:59 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Are you going to reinstall Nortons or go with Avast or something of the sort? I run Nortons on 2 shrubbers here and Avast on the other. I'm happy with both and the Avast was free!
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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Fri Nov 07, 2008 9:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Having gotten 3 seperate and unrelated recommendations for Avast in a span of 2 days, I decided to give it a try.

We'll see how it goes.
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ohiomike
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 3:57 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

mohrorless wrote:
Having gotten 3 seperate and unrelated recommendations for Avast in a span of 2 days, I decided to give it a try.

We'll see how it goes.

Good choice. It is the only one I've found that A) Works, and B) Doesn't slow your machine down.
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Sir Papa Smurph
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 7:01 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I use AVG.

are y'all sayin Avast is more better?
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mohrorless
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PostPosted: Sat Nov 08, 2008 7:22 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm still evaluating, so I don't know if it is better or not.
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Michelle
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PostPosted: Thu Nov 13, 2008 3:07 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Norton. Ugh!
I've used it on and off over the years because it came with computers. Didn't like it myself. Slowed things down and had trouble getting rid of it all off the machines.
If you want to pay for an anti-virus that isn't Norton, I'd go with Trend Micro. I used that one for a while and it wasn't too bad.

But, I'm with Papa, Crazy and Ohiomike. AVG or Avast any day. I used AVG for a long time but I didn't like the more recent release (is it 7.0?) so I switched to Avast. I'd used Avast before but had preferred AVG, now it's the other way around. Avast updates every day, has real-time protection, scans the emails and doesn't hog resources. I think the only thing it doesn't do is scheduled scans. You have to do those manually.

I don't think you can go wrong with either of those two. And Trend Micro Housecall is a good free online scan that I use in between Avast scans.

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