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.
Trying to uninstall by activating the uninstall option to no effect was taking up further memory, creating an overall scenario of what I like to call, using a technical term of my own, a pig’s ear of a mess.
Andy Tech was missing bowling night with the lads. I thought he could just pop over for half an hour to uninstall Norton, but from the outset he warned me that this was unrealistic. Norton doesn’t just uninstall in half an hour. It requires someone of the calibre of Mark Zuckerberg or Tim Berners-Lee to come round to your house and spend hours bending their brains in half.
The idea that an anti-virus programme can begin to act like a virus, to all intents and purposes, is mind-boggling to me.
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