telling you, kaspersky, its the best, and it doesn't slow the crap out of your pc when its booting up,or at all, just sits in the background doing the business, looking a nice shade of green.

Eset Nod32 is the best there is, although Kaspersky is excellent aswell, and a good price.

You have to be careful with Nod 32, it does the business but it was initially built for the coporate market and has lots of functions that are useless to the home user.

The main one is the ability for an Ativirus server to constantly update itself and then push the updates on all of the desktop clients.

Because of all this functionality it is much more bloated thean say AVG or Kapersky.

Meant to post this last week but forgot.
When you reformat your computer with the recovery disk, or most other apps they'll only delete the sort of index so the computer can't assemble the data and not fill the harddrive with 0s. So the data is still there, just the computer doesn't "see" it - which is also why police can still recover files if someone was to do a basic reformat.

There are apps out to attempt to recover the data, I won't post the link but 'Hiren' provides a number of different applications which might help you.

Be a good idea to use Norton Ghost to take an image of your system when you get it how you like it.

McAfee is a good AV software product. The reason why you have had dramas is because of Norton AV.

Norton inbeds itself right into your registery, and some of the changes made can only be manually reconfigured. An it is not a good idea to mess with registery settings unless you know exactly what you are doing.

I have had my Dell XPS with McAfee now for around 2 years. I have had now problems at all. AV software is something you need to keep on top of along with your Firewall settings. McAfee updates every time i go on the net and has never let me down yet.

Norton AV is possibly the worst AV product about IMO

All good reviews for Norton 2009 though. Quicker scans and more lightweight on your processor. They've changed

Im no AV SME in all fairness to Norton. Just know that a few ppl had dramas with the old versions. So if they have sorted it out for the 09 release then fair play to em. Although in my opinion it would take alot for me to go with Norton over other AV software out there. That may stem from the fact that i am used to using McAfee on the servers at work though. So i may have a slighly biast opinion.

Not sure why ppl have been rebuilding there comps for a virus though. That is last ditch effort once everything else has been tried and failed. It seems a bit severe to jump straight to a rebulild as the resoltuion to a simple problem with a virus??

But as i said im a server and networking geek. so only know what i need to ref AV really.

Throw it down the yard

Uninstalling old versions of Norton are always a pain imo. There are downloads on the internet which will do it for you without using the Norton uninstaller, as it tends to leave too much behind anyhow.

I'd be pushed to suggest you install Avast; it's one of the few AV which will let you scan your computer before Windows loads making it a lot more effective than when the virus processes are running.

You now need to create a boot CD with Malware Bytes and Avast on and boot from it.

Then you can run both pieces of software in DOS without the virus's having loaded and remove them.

Have you tried running Malware bytes in Windows?

Thanks guys. I'll keep at it

Quote: Sir Alan "I've had problems for a few weeks now and have tried all sorts of stuff. I had spybot but it just wont run at all now. I have AVG and more recently A Squared on a 30 day trial. I tried to install Cloud but says Norton needs uninstalling first but it just wont uninstall. It gets near the end but cant finish. In the meantime my PC is still hijacked and all sorts of unexpected stuff keeps happening. A Squared has found high risk trojans but can't deal with them before the PC shuts down. The whole thing is about to get thrown through the window. Any alternative suggestions guys?'" service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ts ... 3108162039

Quote: Sir Alan "I've had problems for a few weeks now and have tried all sorts of stuff. I had spybot but it just wont run at all now. I have AVG and more recently A Squared on a 30 day trial. I tried to install Cloud but says Norton needs uninstalling first but it just wont uninstall. It gets near the end but cant finish. In the meantime my PC is still hijacked and all sorts of unexpected stuff keeps happening. A Squared has found high risk trojans but can't deal with them before the PC shuts down. The whole thing is about to get thrown through the window. Any alternative suggestions guys?'" service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/ts ... 3108162039

one other problem now when i try and put the product key in to use one off the window programmes its saying key invalid i have never tired using the key before so how can it be invalid

Well, that's defo done some good. Since removing Norton it seems all the other stuff is starting to work (malware bytes, avg, avasti.....) although Pandaghost wants to get rid of AVG now.
I'll know more over the next few days but thanks alot to all of you.
Now then. My PC hasn't got any restore points bar today. Now I know that's not right. Any ideas ?
Also. It keeps playing random radio stations along side the normal programme, media player for example or my lads Runescape game. Any similar stories or advice?
PS Please don't lock this thread as I'm certain alot of others are trying out some of these tips which in turn can only improve the quality of discussion on this forum. Besides, why shouldn't we help each other out if we can? It only costs a bit of effort and time at the end of the day eh?
Thanks again.