We have an HP with XP and the "force feed" Norton has expired. My boyfriend hired someone to fix it. She installed McAffee. I tried to explain to them that the best way to fix it would be to install the full version of Norton. I don't like Norton or McAffee but I have seen similar problems before with the HP/Norton witches brew of code. They are dependent on each other to be functional. When the Norton expired it caused all kinds of problems with the OS. Installing the McAffee seemed to just complicate the problem. Is there an easy fix for this?

you need to shut down all the services for Norton and/or Mc Afee. Once the services are stopped then it will be safe to uninstall the program....you should never have more than one anti-virus on your computer at any time.

We took it into the shop. They found 9 viruses. I don't run AV on my pc and I have never had a virus. I've had some spyware but that is all. Maybe I should knock on wood or something but for as little protection as they provide, they are not worth the trouble they cause. About a 10% catch rate, if you're lucky.

actually the best defense is knowing what you are doing to begin with
Teaching yourself to not auto open emails with attachments...not to auto accept downloads ...etc...etc...etc. is the best protection that you can have...the rest is kind of supplemental.

Norton (in my opinion) is junk to begin with...as soon as you don't pay them your system is auto flooded with all kinds of crap....not to mention all the known issues Norton has caused with computers that it is installed on.

I have another question for you, if you don't mind. My motherboard has 2 RAM slots. I keep running out of virtual memory. My RAM is already at 526mb. My hard drive is a 320gb Western digital Caviar. Can I just add to one of the slots or do both have to be the same mb of memory?

Repost this question in a separate thread and I will be glad to anser it....just adding question after question to a post does not help as the posts get losts....