My dad’s subscription to Norton Anti-Virus had just expired. He was advised to buy the latest version, rather than simply renewing his subscription. So he handed me the new box of Norton installers and asked me to uninstall the old version, then install this.

Uninstalling is no problem. Installing the new Norton Internet Security (Anti-Virus plus firewall) goes smoothly. So does live-updating to the very latest set of virus definitions, etc.

Next in the packet is ‘Norton GoBack’. It appears to enable you to take your hard disk back in time to just before you did something fatal – a very nice idea but one in which I just don’t believe. Unless it makes multiple, date-stamped, on-the-fly duplicates of all your files, which appears not to be the case, how can it know what to restore? I consult with dad and on the basis that we’re not sure that it is a bad thing and trusting Norton to do things at least tolerably well, I install it. It goes OK, apart from demanding installation of .NET.

Finally, there’s Norton Ghost, which appears to do a very similar thing to GoBack but goes back to user-defined recovery points. The restart after installation is a nightmare. It spends forever ‘removing old GoBack’ data from the hard disk, then gets as far as trying to display dad’s desktop, then hangs. Restarts don’t help. All I can do is restart, use the grace period before Windows boots to choose not to invoke GoBack, then continue the Windows boot and uninstall Ghost and GoBack. The PC’s boot is now much slower, I’ve spent 4 hours on this installation, at least two of which were waiting for Ghost to do things to GoBack data and engendered a big yucky Norton icon on the system tray.