daisy, daisy

A small discovery yesterday.

My most recently acquired PC running Windows 8.1 has been sluggish ever since I've had it. In fairness, I bought it in the trolley with the groceries and it's been on light duties so I've never really bothered to sort it out. Finally frustrated that it was so slow, I wondered what would happen if I deleted Norton 360, which is the firewall and anti-virus protection. It was up for renewal in any case.

Apart from the trauma of trying to remove Norton, the effect has been most encouraging. Subsequently, the machine has sped up dramatically, rebooting and loading programs much faster than before. Of course, none of the scientific tests and benchmarks show this, but I'll use Windows Defender now instead of Norton on that machine.

There were a few extra wrinkles to removing Norton. Simply uninstalling it didn't work. It tried to re-install itself the next time I rebooted, ironically in a manner similar to the way a virus works.

Next, I tried switching off the licence. That worked partially, although it still reinstalled itself and then when I tried to disable it, it relicenced itself using a spare licence from my Norton user account.

I searched to I find out about the Norton Extraction Tool, which does 'completely' remove Norton products. I used this and it seems to have worked, although a side effect of Norton's installation was to disable the Windows Defender product. I had to use another thing called the Windows Action Centre to re-enable Defender, but it does all seem to be working now.

I don't consider most of this to be 'friendly' behaviours for a system, and I seriously wonder how many people have the knowledge to work around all of these systems. Hardly a simple process.