Correctly Uninstalling a Norton and McAfee Product

If you have purchased a new computer from the store as of lately, you will notice that it comes pre-installed with tons of useless garbage software. These ‘trialware’ usually allow you to sample the software for a limited amount of time and when the trial expiration date nears or have been exceeded, it will continually nag you to purchase the full version of the software. If you don’t want to purchase them, you will need to uninstall them. Two notorious bundled antivirus software that comes pre-installed on your new PC is either from Norton or McAfee. I will show you how to completely rid of these software so you can use your own choice of antivirus software.

While I’m not necessarily bad mouthing these two antivirus products, a lot of users want to use other antivirus products of their choice. True, you can simply head over to the Control Panel and uninstall the product that way but it’s not the best method. Not only do some users experience error messages which results in a failed un-installation, the antivirus products can still leave a host of other traces in your computer even after a proper uninstall.

While Norton and McAfee products were labeled as software that slows down a user computer system, I have to admit that they have come a long way and things have gotten better, speed wise. I have tried the most recent Norton 360 product and it really didn’t drain my computer resources that much. With new computers having more than 4GB or more of RAM pre-installed, you don’t really have to worry about system resources anymore like how it was back then when you only had 512MB – 1GB of RAM. However, in this day and age, people expect to have alternatives. The more you shove a certain software in the face of users, the more the user will want an alternative! You no doubt must have had that feeling when you first logged in to your newly bought computer system only to find dozens of software and utilities already installed littering your desktop space with icons . Most of those software aren’t even needed by most users! For this article though, I will focus mainly on just uninstalling Norton and McAfee products.

Both Norton and McAfee companies have created a special uninstall tool for just one purpose. Scrubbing their products off of a user’s computer hard drive. I have used both of these tools extensively on many computers loaded with trial/unwanted Norton and McAfee products. The tools are very easy to use and usually just requires one single reboot to complete the procedure. Once completed, your system shouldn’t have any traces left of the product, especially in the registry portion. You might still need to delete some folders in ‘Program Files’ but even if you don’t, they shouldn’t be of any concern. Your main concern is not wanting any traces in your registry and these uninstall tools were created especially for that purpose.

For Norton removals, you need to know the product version installed on your computer to download the right uninstaller. But even if you don’t know the version, just download the most recent one and it should also allow you to uninstall a previous version as well.

You can download the Norton Removal Tool here.

You can download the McAfee Consumer Products Removal Tool here.

As you can see, getting rid of these pesky antivirus software is not particularly hard, it’s more of a hassle. If you have indeed used the trial version and it has expired but you don’t want to pony up $40-$50 for another year of protection, then look at my post detailing the free antivirus software’s out there.

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