Melissa Kite Melissa Kite

Real life | 4 October 2018

It’d take Tim Berners-Lee himself to escape from its vice-like grip

issue 06 October 2018

Two and a half hours after my tech guy began trying to uninstall Norton, he had purple smoke coming out of his nose and mouth. Well, Vimto-flavoured vapour. Sucking on this pseudo-crack pipe like a junkie, he was, and I was itching all over from a bad case of techno-hives.

‘What on earth is happening?’ I kept asking him as he ransacked the hard drive of my laptop, making code flash all over the screen. He told me that if this didn’t work, the only option would be to wipe the entire hard drive clean and start again.

I couldn’t explain to you what he explained to me about what was going wrong if I wanted to, or not in his words. The gist of it was that since I refused to put in my credit card details to renew my subscription for the first year in a long, long time, Norton, whether through design or accident, was taking up 30 per cent of the memory of my computer by permanently triggering windows to try to open itself up.

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