Getting rid of crap

My daughter just bought a new E-Machine which has Norton, Mcafee, AOL and a bunch of other undesirable stuff pre-installed on it. She wants it gone so the important question is AOL, Norton and Mcafee. I recall a while back someone saying it is almost impossible to get completely rid of these. Anyone hear anything about any particular problems dumping these. Thanks
Den

 

Just go to ADD/REMOVE PROGRAMS within the control panel, and you should be able to remove them just fine.

Then run this utility to remove any (your word) "crap" from the system....

CCleaner:

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4191

 

Removing Norton AV

http://service1.symantec.com/SUPPORT/nav.nsf/docid/2001092114452606

 

I would get rid of Norton and McAfee too. But just remember to install an anti-virus of your choice. I suggest AVG (free). and a firewall (I suggest Kerio) but there are other good ones too.

CC

 

Good points! Stupid beer made me forget about this point.

I personally prefer Sygate Personal firewall (free) and Avast! home edition for virus protection.......also free

 

If you have problems removing Norton the Follow the instructions in this article:

Removing your Norton program using SymNRT

 

Personnally I would format reinstall as most of us know uninstalling some of those progs can result in an ongoing drama.

 

Formatting and reinstalling the OS accomplishes nothing, but putting the same 'crap' back on the system. As the programs in question come pre-installed on the system. Reinstalling the system from the factory restore CD's would restore the system to the factory pre-install state.

 

i don't know so much about that. when i bought my comp it had a bunch of crap on it. i reinstalled XP and it was crap free. although i had a pile of discs that came with it that had all the crap on 'em. say bye bye to them

 

Thanks everyone for all the info and links. I have heard for a long time that Norton can be difficult to remove and those links will help. I also heard that AOl is worse than a virus for integrating throughout the machine. I am expecting trouble with that one. I will definitely use cc and also have avg and zone alarm installed as I have on my own machines before starting. I will also check out Kerio,Avast and Sygate. E-Machine doesn't even ship restore discs. they must be copied from the system which means she would get the same thing with a re-install. I will return with update later. Thanks
Den

 

If it didn't ship with restore CDs, then the computer has a restore partition. Poke around the start menu to see if there is an option to create restore CDs. Could take between 7-10 CDs to create a restore set.

 

Already done that used 4 cds. Using those to restore would still have the same crap as before. But better to have than not. Thanks
Den

 

XP prosp2 slipstreamed only way to go!
Work from there and the only Nortons product to use is Ghost 2003.

 

Update just to let everyone know. Norton, Mcaffee, AOL and other junk was uninstalled without any problems by using add-remove programs. So far everything is working fine. Thanks for the help.
Den