I have been “protected” for about a year now via Norton and felt that I was reasonably secure.  Yet when the subscription ran out I continually ignored the warnings to upgrade, probably because I really didn’t want to come out of pocket for anything.  So it was no real shock to me when my computer was bombarded with utter garbage this past week.

First came the pop-ups in both IE and FF.  Then came the odd error messages about IE with something related to a buffer overrun anytime I tried to do something.  The popups, conveniently timed to load every half second, were great!  It was refreshing not to be able to do anything except learn about universities, antivirus applications, and all of the single ladies in my area who were into anal fetishes.

Naturally, my knee-jerk reaction was to update my subscription to Norton.  After all, they would protect me from the wild internet, right?  Wrong.  I couldn’t have been more wrong, despite knowing somewhere deep in the confines of my mind that I should take another path toward fixing my issues.  Yet, I caved.  After I renewed the first step was to run a full system scan.  Thankfully that only took 2 hours.  Not like I was actually needing the computer or anything.  So the scan ran and found….are you ready….NOTHING WRONG.  Great!  As soon as the Norton light on the system tray turned green and stated I was secure, and if some really oddly and ironically timed moment, I got another pop-up.

I then installed Lavasoft Ad-Aware and ran another full system scan.  This time, it found 479 infected file.  Yea.  479.  It was like that scene in The Big Lebowski.  “Eight year olds, dude.”  That was how I felt.  So I finished the scan and cleaned up the system and then rebooted.

The pop-ups continue.

Next, I thought I would try Spybot Search & Destroy.  I mean, why would one program do what I need?  Surely it would take installing at least 3 programs to remove one virus, right?  Search & Destroy found even more problems that Ad-Aware and Norton failed to catch.  However, some of the problems were related to files still in use, so I had to reboot and run a scan at startup.  After that was done, I started the computer, with the little green “Hey you are secure” Norton light on.

Another pop-up.

Frustrated to no end, I asked a guy at work in the IT department what the hell I was doing wrong.  He simply said “Avast”.  Avast, a program I had never heard of, is a free tool much like Norton (except it actually works).  The best part about Avast for a home user such as myself, is that it is free.  Yea, free.  It is so great to find an application that is worth something but is offered for free.

I installed Avast which, like the others, wanted to run a scan when the PC booted.  This took about and hour and a half to two hours, but found even more problems.  The difference between Avast and the other 3 programs I installed was that it actually removed the problems.  The computer rebooted and I have had ZERO problems since.  Zero.  Nada.  Zilch.

All I can say is thank you, Avast.  Thank you.  Norton will no longer be getting any more of my money.