Ditching Norton...

Since switching back to a PC from a Mac, I've been having a 2 month trial version of Norton Internet Security. I've talked about switchting back to a PC in an earlier Blog Post. If you want toknow more about that, check out my Blog Post "Picking a new Computer...". I haven't been a fon of Norton for a couple of years. Mostly it's the fact because Norton hooks itself way to deep into your system and a lot of the features just slow down your system and don't provide any additional security. Norten used to be top notch program, but these days a lot of it has become basically "bloatware". Recently there also been instances when systems that Norton were supposed to protect had become infected. So that's just not a good sales agrument for Norton.
So I dug a little deeper into the entire issue and it seems that all people on the forums agree that Norton isn't that what it used to be. There are a lot of people out ther who have sucessfully gone completely freeware. But since my PC is a computer that I use mostly for work...well I wasn't going to take that risk. If you take your time to dig through the forums it's a toss up between McAfee and Kapersky. I've dealt with both programs in the past and I never had a problem with either one.
In the end I went with Kapersky Internetsecurity 2013, since it seemed to be a bit a better fit for my needs.
Removing Norton from my system was easy, you just have to download Norton Removal Tool... and it's pretty much a piece of cake. So I popped in the CD I had gotten at a local Computer Store and didn't expect any problems, expecially since the package explicitly stated it was ready for Windows 8. Well never trust advertising. It came up with the message, that it didn't support Windows 8. But I wasn't ready to give up that quickly. So I run the install routine twice with Administrator Rights. The first time it came up with the same error message. The second time it advised me that I had to download the updated version from the Kapersky server. So I did exactly that. Since the file was only 200 MB I expected it to be done within 5 minutes since I have a 100 MBit connection. Turns out that it was only downloading with about 300 KB/sec and it took almost 20 minutes. After that the install routing worked exactly the way you expect. Once finished I ran a full system check and the system was clean. The only vulnerabilites were Internet Explorer. I applied the necessary changes, although I don't even use IE. Made some custom changes to the settings to better fit my needs and now everything is ready to go.