I reckon
@MilesAhead is spot-on where he says of Norton:
...It's pure harassment. Preloaded is the only way it would get on any of my machines. ...
-MilesAhead
I have removed Norton AV from the PCs of several friends who did not have the knowledge to do it themselves, and were finding the thing to be an annoying and harassing malware. Without exception, they were all very grateful when I had banished the thing and given them a proper, free and friendly AV product in its stead. Even in the case of the laptop I described above, Norton AV was already entirely superfluous by definition, because the Windows 8 OS comes with
Windows Defender, which now incorporates a great Firewall
and MS Security Essentials - the latter being a perfectly/very good AV product. In such a context, the
act of pre-installing the cuckoo egg of Norton AV is a deliberately corrupt/unethical and misleading/mendacious ripoff, making a victim of the unsuspecting and gullible end-user. Such unacceptable/sharp practice and all the practitioners of same are rightly deserving of being despised.
From experience, I personally would prefer
not to touch any Norton product - ever - including their own amusingly and ironically-named
Norton Removal Tool.
They seem to have acknowledged by that name that an installed Norton/Symantec product is in itself a kind of virus infection like a rootkit, that necessitates a special removal and clean-up tool. Right. Say no more.
I discovered a few years back that, once your PC had a Norton product installed, it was prudent to treat it like any virus infection, and the only sure way to successfully expunge it was, as
@MilesAhead described - i.e., not with the NRT (which might not remove all of the virus, or might in itself present a further threat) but with conventional removal tools - e.g., including RevoUninstaller, CCleaner, and doing a manual Registry search/edit for Norton/Symantec keyword strings. (Having had a good night's sleep, I am about to perform the latter on that new laptop I mentioned above, as the laptop is being blocked from completing the FREE upgrade to Win8.1, and I suspect there may still be some residual Norton hooks that need to be removed - the install presumably can't take place if there is something in the existing system (like Norton AV) which is hostile to or disables something in the Windows OS asset store.
Who knows whether, before long, MBAM might not include Norton software infections in its definition of PUP? Norton infections are certainly hostile to MBAM and MS SE and about as useful and certainly as insidious as Candyware (QED per example above). It's not even a case of
caveat emptor, because the majority of unsuspecting and luckless buyers won't have the wherewithal to
know that there is a Norton virus infection pre-installed by the OEM install.
You can read discussions in various forums about Norton/Symantec where it seems that not a few people, from experience, have learned to distrust Norton/Symantec products - e.g., this discussion and also see DC Forum discussion thread
Norton Identity Safe -- Free Download.
The foregoing shows that there's a reason for this -
a Norton product is a virus infection - hijackharassransomware; a PC-bedbug or whatever else you might call it.
