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Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

wow, I just bought my fiancée a gaming laptop and it came preinstalled with Norton—I didn't uninstall it right away because I predicted it would be a pain, but now I'm going to do that first thing after work today. people like my dad still go out of their way to install Norton on every computer they get their hands on—just a few years ago I built my mom a cheap simple desktop to dump her photos onto, and one day she told me it was really slow all of the sudden, so I checked it out and lo and behold my dad had installed Norton on it and it had made everything molasses-slow. kind of sad to see this once-respected software suite stooping to these levels.

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Grab the laptop's license key, download a bootable windows installer and throw out whatever comes pre-installed. Very fast and almost the only way to get rid of the bloat.

This is the first step for any store bought machine: a fresh install from your own install media. It's the only way to be sure (and is much faster).

My dad had the same attitude about 10-15 years ago. The printer wasn't working. I found it didn't work because an AV product (maybe even Norton?) was slowing down the printer driver and hit some kind of timeout. I disabled AV.

A few months later they fell to a ransomware attack. The name of somebody they didn't know very well but recognized the name of had shown up with an attachment. I wondered if the AV product would have caught it.

Ransomware wasn’t around 10 years ago.

It definitely was.

i dont know anyone that ever respected Norton, i think its time to have the 'talk' with dad.

Back in the MS-Dos days Norton was the only game in town for a bunch of things... Disk defragmenting, tools for working with file system, etc. It was a swiss army knife of good tools. But your point is generally correct in that for the last 20 years it has been atrociously bad.

>Back in the MS-Dos days Norton was the only game in town for a bunch of things

In the mid-1980s, PC Tools[0] was a worthy competitor to Norton.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Tools_(software)

I should've said that my dad still manually runs dfrg.msc weekly and has a shortcut to it on his desktop lol

dfrgui.exe

Though I guess if it's a shortcut you don't see the actual filename too often. :)

ah, that's what I meant—I didn't realize it had been renamed!

Norton Commander was amazing; had it running on my family PCs since 1990 and up until it got upgraded to Windows 2000. Nothing good came from Norton since (that I know of).

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