Worst excuse for keeping Norton: I have already paid for it

If you search for the word "Norton" using the search engine in the upper right corner of our website, you will discover that our advice to dump Norton branded software is echoed by dozens of other visitors to the site.

This week I saw a computer that took 27 minutes to completely boot up. It was an older system with 256MB of RAM and a 1.6ghz processor. Even at that, 27 minutes was a long time.

I noticed that they had the latest version of Norton 360 installed. I told them that the system would at least double in speed if they uninstalled Norton. "I know you don't like it, but we already paid for it."

Agreed but took the system home intending to reformat it and add RAM over the weekend.

However, when I got it home, I uninstalled Norton since I was going to erase the hard drive anyway. The system instantly jumped in speed. I timed the bootup time and it was just shy of 9 minutes. That's a 66 percent improvement.

I turned off a few chat programs and other goodies that were running in the background. I didn't even to a reformat on the system as it now booted up in under 5 minutes - that's better than Vista on a gig of RAM and dual core processor.

I was happy with the performance and took the computer back explaining that all I had done for the most part was uninstall Norton.

They agreed that I should leave it off and they were happy to go with AVG.

I have already heard from them twice in the last 24 hours, each time to thank me for the work I did on improving the speed of their computer.

I didn't add any RAM. They are still running XP on 256MB, but it is such an improvement that they don't even know how much faster it could run and they don't care.

Norton is bad software. I have said it many times, but I must say it again.

Viruses cause computers to run slow, crash and lockup. What good is an antivirus if it causes the very problems it should be protecting you from?

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