Technical Difficulties

ComputercrashI’ve been having computer problems all day.  I upgraded my Norton 360 from version 4 to version 5 a couple days ago and ever since I’ve been unable to connect to my home network (printers and second computer) and had difficulty getting my browser to connect to the internet.  I was able to get Firefox and Chrome to work but couldn’t get IE to work.

I have 3 PC’s and two of then upgraded correctly.  I had the internet connection but in my efforts to fix the printer and network issue by making changes I’ve lost the ability to connect to the internet in any capacity on my main computer.  So, right now I’m in the process of restoring the system software to a time before I installed the upgrade.

Crossing my fingers. 

Update:  The System Restore did the trick.  I still have to upgrade installed and everything seems to be working now.

 

26 thoughts on “Technical Difficulties”

    • I agree, With MSE I haven’t had any of those scam virus checker scams or anything. This is the happiest my computer has ran since 1987

  4. >> dump the third party scanners and get “windows security essentials” <<

    I heartily second that opinion, Norton and Mcafee are a huge pain, a bit of a racket (though there are far worse offenders in the AV field), and totally unnecessary now. Worst of all, they can actually HARM the stability and performance of your system. WSE is all you need.

  5. Yeah, Norton is famous for cutting of internet access. Might I suggest AVG? I use it on all of my PCs and the relatives PCs for the past ten years. No viruses, small footprint, and free.

  6. Update: The System Restore did the trick. I still have to upgrade installed and everything seems to be working now. (I haven’t tried everything, but so far things are good)
    In trying to fix the situation I think I screwed it up royally.

    Thanks for the advice.

  7. The update is good news, glad it’s working out. I was kidding about the Mac. RickHap got me hooked on Mac’s, I think you remember that night……or maybe not, dunno.

    • I remember some things, like wondering why there is a ditch in front of your house… and why was I in it (briefly).

      I started out on Mac, as a matter of fact I had the very first Mac when they hit St. Louis. 1218K of memory, no hard drive, a 9 inch black and white screen and a disk drive all built into the cabinet. It came with two programs MacPaint and some word processor. Only $2,995! But it was cool at the time.
      I still have an original iMac here in my office and I can’t even figure out how to work it now.

  9. Ditch Norton. What a hog and a waste of money. Use MS Security Essentials, MS Defender. All free, and work just as well without all the problems Norton introduces.

  11. The worst part of Nortons, is that it uses at least 25% of your total computers processing power. Sometimes much more. Definitely Microsoft Security Essentials is the best. Microsoft was sued to remove their antivirus protection from their operating system years ago, mostly by Norton. Seriously, who else better to provide the virus malware protection than the company who designed the operating system.

  12. I agree with the people here. Ditch norton, and also mcAfee. Those two programs i found generally irritating, or sapping a lot of your computers resources.

    On the flipside: there is not one ‘the best’ virus scanner, but there are a lot better alternatives. There is a website that (-claims to-) does independent testing of virus scanner programs: http://www.av-comparatives.org/ . There is a lot to read here, but you will see that no program is the best, and every program has its own downside. The results also tend to vary from year to year, since the programs are obviously updated. Perhaps you can look there for an independent view of the viruscanner.

    Personally i use the Eset NOD32 virus scanner. Firewalls, however, are always a headache, especially with home networks.

  14. This is coming from someone who has tried nearly every virus scanner you can think of, and is a full-blown computer nerd:

    First off, yes, Norton and McAfee are absolutely horrendous, sapping your CPU’s usage and overall just causing more problems than they prevent… but the windows scanner isn’t all that great either.

    The best scanner I’ve found, and by best, I mean it scans thoroughly, taking up less resources, completely customizable when and how much to scan and how much priority, and has the most features… is AVG.

    AVG used to have a free version and a paid version, where the free version lasted forever, but it didn’t have everything the full version had. Now they’ve switched to a full version and a “trial” that expires after 30 days. It’s popularity has plummeted. However, if you enter in this code in the regristration box:

    8MEH-RCKOP-BP9KK-YW8EA-6KS4O-SEMBR-ACED

    You’ll be upgraded to the full version, Free! Some other scanners come paired with the ability to clean your registry or defrag your disk drive, but if you really need to do that, you should get programs dedicated to doing so – they’re usually better than “features” of programs.

    Here’s a link to their page: http://free.avg.com/us-en/download-avg-internet-security

    Keep in mind, you’ll be getting ALL of these features, with the code I put up earlier. Just download the free version, then upgrade.

  15. It may also be worth mentioning that no matter how well protected. All it takes is one visit to a malicious website, a unlucky click and your virus protection will do you no good.

  16. Thank god Windows has system restore. One day I had several computer problems, and after doing system restore the computer worked well again.

    I don’t like Norton anymore and stopped using it several years ago when it used up allot of system restores and slowed down my computer. This was prior to Windows XP.

    I being using Trend Micro Internet Security and have had to re-configure 2 times so that it wouldn’t block internet access.

    • My problem was on my PC for sure, because I had no problem updating my two other computers. As far as system restore goes, I’ve tried it several times over the years and it didn’t work more often than it did work. Luckily it worked fine this time. I’ll consider dumping Norton when the next renewal comes up.

  17. MS Security Essentials or Avast(Free) are the only two that I would recommend

    The free version of AVG is a resource hog

  18. I did research on protection for my Mac and decided to go with Sophos, which is a free program. Since Macs have so little problem with malware, spyware and viruses, I am not sure how good it is doing, but it has alerted me on a few occasions that it has quarantined a site.

  19. I was having the same problem. I loaded a new Norton program and IE stopped working yet Chrome and Firefox was working. After much research, all I had to do was go to tools, internet options, advanced, and reset internet explorer options. That did the trick!!

  20. FWIW, Norton may be working. But the program uses way more resources than necessary to do the same job many of the free alternatives use. For that simple reason I quit recommending Norton over ten years ago. It used to be a simple program that did the job and did it well. Now it is a huge hog that has numerous components, many of which still run and stay behind once you do a basic uninstall of Norton. If you decide to uninstall Norton, after it says it is gone, there will still be traces of it left running on your system. If you do uninstall, afterwards, search the net for Norton removal tool. They provide a program that actually does go through and finish removing all traces once you uninstall it.

Comments are closed.