The Curse

I believe I am cursed. In the past month, I have had two different antivirus programs refuse to uninstall from two different computers. You’d think that programs meant to keep harmful stuff off your computer wouldn’t in of themselves cause harm, but these two have.

First was the adventure with PeoplePC’s internet security system. We upgraded (finally) from dial-up to wi-fi about a month ago. Part of that included installing Avast Antivirus on our two desktop computers. We’d used it before and thought it worked just fine – never had any virus trouble. On one computer, PeoplePC bid adieu fairly easily. On the other, however, the tentacles were wrapped and locked. I eventually had to wipe the hard drive and restore everything to factory settings in order to get rid of the thing.

Now the same eerie thing is happening with my laptop. Yesterday, I tried uninstalling a copy of Norton Antivirus in favor of Avast. No go. Not only won’t Norton uninstall, it won’t let Avast install and instead the conflict is making my computer not want to boot up at all. Fortunately, I’ve gotten around the bootup problem, but still have to uninstall Norton. They offer an uninstall program which I’m hoping will solve the problem, but if it doesn’t, I guess I’m looking at wiping and restoring the laptop as well. Frustration. We finally get service that’s capable of letting me use the wireless capability of my laptop, and now it’s vulnerable to viruses because Norton’s subscription is expired and I can’t install Avast over it. I certainly hope their uninstall program works, or I’ll have some choice words to say. I’m not confident, as PeoplePC offered a similar solution, and it didn’t work.

I need the laptop to function, however, because it’s got the best configuration to run Second Life, which I’m involved in now for one of my masters classes. It’s a weird thing to be involved with a pseudo-computer game for a class, but as I’m learning, this is more of a virtual world than a game.