avast and norton

Hi

q) Does avast work as well as nortons antivirus. (keep this simple please)

q) I want to put avast on my PC but it already has nortons antivirus and 6 months left on subscription. Will I encounter any problems by loading avast as well but dont run both at the same time.
I cant convince my dad to completely uninstall 1 for the other because avast is freeware and he is suspicious of this

thanks

Hello Jagguy.
I don’t think Avast! will allow you to install because it will detect the presence of Norton.
I’m sure it’s better than Norton, but it’s one or the other, not both.
This is typical for every AV-prog with a background guard : they interfere with eachother when both are installed.
Don’t do it.
Fast

I think you should wait until your 6 months is up. If your having doubts about the efficiency of your current av you can always perform an online scan @

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

Avast Free is a great AV solution, the best free AV available :stuck_out_tongue:

If you have a look through the forum, you will find many people who have ditched Norton in favour of avast!. This may give you an indication of how many people have switched sides. I only used Norton because I got a 90 day trial when I bought my computer, and then immediately removed it and installed avast! ;D.

But since you still have six months left, rather not waste money and use it until it expires

I dumped Norton with time left on subscription on 1 computer, dumped Zone Alarm Security Suite with 6 months left on another. Now using Avast! home on both computers, free firewalls from Sygate and Kerio. No regrets; not going back; things work a lot better, use less resources, easier to manage. But avast! will not install with Norton present. If you have a way to reinstall Norton, remove it and install avast!, tell your dad you will put it back if he is not happy. I sold my Norton 2005 update on eBay instead of installing it.

a) Yes, it works even better and it will not hang your computer as Norton does. Norton is largest system hog of all. This is Simple…

b) I want to put avast on my PC but it already has nortons antivirus and 6 months left on subscription. Will I encounter any problems by loading avast as well but don't run both at the same time. I cant convince my dad to completely uninstall 1 for the other because avast is freeware and he is suspicious of this

Yes, you will… you’ll get yourself unbelievable headaches and additional problems. Two antiviruses on the same machine, with resident protection enabled, never worked fine.
As far as your father’s thinking goes… it’s totally wrong I have to say… first of all - avast! IS NOT freeware. avast! is professional antivirus tool with one of the best test results out there. Good thing is, avast! HAS freeware version, for all those that are unable to spend lots of money for antivirus products. Also, there is technical support through e-mail, phone and these forums, completely free of charge. Where else will your father get that ? Simply said - Nowhere.

So, I’ve seen many people with even few months left of Norton subscription, abandoned that “prehistoric mammoth” because of some other good antivirus tools. I’m not saying like some fanatic, that avast! is best of the best out there, but for sure, it’s wonderful product with wonderful future. It gets better and better with every single program update. Antivirus definitions are updated on daily basis, so it tells something as well. So, if I paid for Norton, and I still have 6 months of subscription, and I found out that it’s not working as it should and as I expected for the money I gave… best of all, if I found much better protection and nothing like that system hog, I’ll uninstall it completely and go with the other one… what’s the use of already wasted money, and large system hog installed on my system, that even doesn’t catch all those viruses out there. Norton sounds powerful, just because it’s so long time out there on the market, and most people don’t know anything about antivirus products, and worst of all, they don’t even bother to learn about those, but they’ve heard from their friends about Norton. It’s easy to remember, that way very easy to recommend to other people… that way, it’s easy to spread it…

Of course, at the end, it’s up to you and your father…

Cheers !

Edit: in case you two decide to uninstall Norton and try with avast!, please come back to this forum again… why ? Because it’s not so easy to get rid of Norton completely, and that will give you additional problems when installing another antivirus. Norton “sticks” to your system like glue (another bad attribute), so you have to make sure you performed proper Norton uninstallation prior to installing another antivirus. Just come back, we’ll lead you through that process… :wink:

Undoubtly… Just ask tons of ex-NAV users here…

You do like or father, of course, why don’t you want the best for him?
Your father has a wise son, why won’t him listen you? ;D

Stop joking, ask any problem you have and we’ll be here.
Welcome to forums… I had to remove NAV a long time ago…
Well, I survived untill now… I’m avast since then.

Hi, jagguy! The words of the other experienced members are PURE WISDOM! I’m not a great skilled user like them… but I remember when Norton was on/in my PC: it “stole” my machine!!! See your Registry: Norton is the King and Master of your machine. It rule all your OS function and many softwares are really penalized in running. Is a fight of 2 souls: YOUR will against the Norton will. Really do you want surrender? After uninstall Norton i found for many times 1000 and 1000 “hidden” traces of it. At last, I decided to reinstall XP. Concluding: try the free Avast! version… I’m sure you will buy also the Professional version. I had Avast! 12 months (free) + 6 months (Professional) on my machine: maybe I’m a lucky man, but I never had problems. Welcome to Avast! Brotherood ;D

Ok I am convinced, the support here is unbelievable comapred to norton. I am still awaiting an email from them.

I will have a new computer to install avast from. I have downloaded avast for winXP. unless there are install issues involved I will have it on soon.

We’ll be waiting for a happy user 8) :slight_smile:

I think part of my confusion was I thought I could run 2 AV on the 1 system. Only have 1 active at a time and just run another to check for missed viruses.
Like adaware, you just run it when you want.

AV isnt that simple it looks and avast looks like a better product anyway.

Some antivirus allow this behavior. But you must be completely sure the second one could be ‘disable’ (not resident, only a second backup scanner).
For instance, if you have avast as your major (resident) antivirus, you could use:
BitDefender Free + AntiVir Personal (with resident disable) + AVG (with resident disable)

But you will never able to use NAV :stuck_out_tongue: even disabled… :frowning:

Hello,

In teory, is possible to use only 1 active AV and use other disabled AV, only using the demand (manual) scanner.
But also I dont recommend… Avs usually uses a lot of registry keys, install management drivers and other stuff no matter if they have an active scan enabled or not.

If you want to use just an on demand scan for missed virus or just to get a second opinion, I recommend use the Online scanners that Trend Micro, Mcafee, Norton (Arghh… I did a promess to never say this name again…), Panda, etc…make available…

You may have any number of this online scanners in your machine…
Take care with Panda only, they dont encrypt their database and may cause false positive from avast…

Thats my 2 cents,

Thank for your time,

Elminster

You’re fully right…

Panda? It will left behind unencrypted files that will be false positive to avast, AVG…
No, Panda, no… as you already said.

Well, it worths more than this 8) :wink:

I with the lingo now.

you can have a fully installed access AV like avast and use an on-demand scanner like trend micro without problems but no2 2 AV fully installed on same PC

q) does avast do spyware,adaware…anything else but viruses as well?

Something yes but not all of them… avast is not a specialized software for adware and spyware.
Protection should be layered and no one software will be perfect and full.
Use Spyware Blaster, SpyBot and Ad-aware for complete protection. :wink:

Edit: in case you two decide to uninstall Norton and try with avast!, please come back to this forum again... why ? Because it's not so easy to get rid of Norton completely

Hello, I am a newcomer to this forum, new user of Avast home eddition and in the same position as the author of this thread - I also switched to avast from NA2000 few weeks before expiration.
That is why the quoted remark caught me. Could you give me some hints where I could find additional info what to do to completely remove all traces of NA? The forums here seem so full of posts that I am afraid of getting lost in searching for the knowledge…

I must add that so far nothing goes wrong. I just uninstalled NA from Add/remove Programs and everything works. After some four days of testing I like avast very very much. It caught one malware in my opera cache, which was there from NA times. But what suprised me a bit, the initial memory load (after cp restart, observed on task manager) is somewhat higher than I had with NA (and one process more). Do you have any explanation, here?

Thnks in advance

Check my website, last paragraph: “How to completely remove Norton AV” (The link is in my signature in this post)

Some steps (waiting for some reply of advanced users of the Forum): open the Services panel searching for traces of NAV downloader etcetera; look at the services running at startup: i suggest to download Code Stuff Starter (http://codestuff.mirrorz.com/) and RegCleaner (by Juni Vuorio: you can download a free version from www.download.com ). This is just for scan hidden traces of NAV. But don’t delete nothing if you are not sure. Avast! have a VRDB, virus database generator, who’s running in the background (see the Help for more infos): maybe is the cause of your high memory usage. You can also disable the automatic running of this service and set it manually.
Listen: is not wasted time to read the Avast! help guide. :wink:

Welcom to the Forum!