Hi Tom. Please see my response to Dave that touches on many of your questions. Try www.symantec.com/nrt to fully remove Norton products. Please read their knowledge base articles on this subject before using it since it is so powerful. I have a friend who attempted to run McAfee on a system like yours. Same result as you. He had to upgrade the hardware (processor and memory) to get it performing much better. Yep, the India support team makes me crazy too. Sometimes they are great... and sometimes they are lousy and I just ask for a supervisor to get better support! Good luck. KenC ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas J. Hesley To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2009 5:54 PM Subject: RE: Norton software Yep. A couple years ago, I purchased the Norton suite ($79.99) because I thought I had a virus and figured that this would be a quick way of killing it. But when I installed the suite, I got far worse than a virus. It did do a lot of scanning that seemed to slow down my 1.4 Ghz Athelon 64 box significantly. So I decided to remove it. More problems. In fact, there seems to be no way you can completely remove all Norton artifacts from your system without a complete reformatting of your hard drive. At that time, they didn't provide an uninstall feature that completely cleaned up everything. So reformatting the drive was precisely what I had to do because when I attempted to uninstall the beast, I unknowingly corrupted my boot sector. The machine would no longer boot and I could not access any of the data. The Recovery Console was useless, since I had no backup of that sector. Then I had to fight the language barriers with the Norton help desk, located in India by the way. They were unable after nearly two hours, to get my drive working again. So I had to repartition and reformat the drive, losing all my data, and do a complete OS install from scratch. Finally to top it all off, I requested a refund of my $79.99, which they agreed to but never provided. So anytime someone says Norton to me these days, I get woozy. A bit of PTSD perhaps? J Tom Hesley http://tomhesley.com/ -----Original Message----- From: jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:jfw-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of dave-d0619 Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2009 5:26 PM To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Subject: Re: Norton software Whether or not Symantech has or has not made substantial improvements to their products is not the point. May I ask, that you find the suite of programs easy to use because, you still have a reasonable degree of vision that you are able to read the screen? The main gripe that those of us who use programs such as JAWS and Window-Eyes have, is that the suite of programs contained within Norton Utilities has become more and more inaccessible over the past few version releases. This means that we need to ask someone with vision in order to configure the program for our changing needs. In my opinion, this is not equal access, that leads to independence and being self sufficient. I would also fundamentally disagree in your statement that the program does not take over enormous computer resources. Another reason why I do not use Norton utilities, is the difficulty you have if you want to remove the product from your system. The same goes for MacAfee and the AOL (arseholes on line) software and the like Sincerely: Dave Durber ----- Original Message ----- From: Kenneth Chernack To: jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Saturday, April 04, 2009 3:30 PM Subject: Re: Norton software Hi. I have been a member of this discussion group for the past few months silently reading and learning a lot. THANKS for the education! I am not a JAWS user today, but I will be using it in my future as my deteriorates. I have been on vacation for the past week or so. I am catching up with email. I noticed a few posts bashing Norton and their 2005 products. This is my first post to this list and I don't mean to ruffle any feathers BUT I am a Norton fan. Norton 360 version 2.0 is a one-stop shopping product that is easy to use, and I really do not believe it degrades the performance of your system. You don't have to integrate Norton Anti-virus and/or Internet Security and/or SystemWorks to get full security protection and other miscellaneous performance tools since Norton 360 has it all and defaults to a schedule of updating your system when your PC has been idle for some time. If the new version still doesn't integrate well with JAWS that is a serious issue. If the new version is too expensive, yes that's another show stopper. But Symantec has made many improvements and enhancements to their products and I would give it a second chance. The company is certainly on top of security issues. Thanks for listening. KenC