On the weekend I was helping out a mate who was having some very strange problems with his HP laptop. A couple of weeks ago I was trying to make his laptop run faster so we uninstalled norton which came pre-installed with the laptop and that’s when the strange problems began, how ever I didn’t tick the problems where being caused from norton.
After we had uninstalled norton, I installed AVG Free for virus protection but once it was installed AVG was unable to run an update for definitions. Then after AVG was installed, we lost all internet connectivity and was only able to gain access to the internet by uninstalling AVG. To begin with I thought the problem laid with AVG but in the end we were able to get internet connectivity with AVG installed so that was the night over and I went home.
A couple of weeks later, firefox stop working but IE was able to connect to the internet, so yesterday I sat down with the laptop to try and get it all sorted. After playing around with the laptop for a couple hours with uninstalling/installing various things I found the only thing that was able to receive internet connectivity was IE and no other applications on the laptop had net access.
I then started to search google for some answers and I read a post of someone who was having a similar problem and was told to download the Norton Removal Tool. So we then downloaded and ran the tool and once we rebooted the computer, everything started working as per normal. I have no idea why the uninstall through windows doesn’t remove everything correctly, but if anyway is having the same problem as I had and recently unistalled norton, I suggest you download and run the Norton Removal Tool from here.