PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

hi folks,

my Win7 has been good since I installed it about 3 years back; however lately I have gotten a browser hijack on Chrome. Because I'm mostly "Mac User Convert" now, I only use my PC for audio projects and I am not up to par on the latest virus / trojan scenes in the Windows world any more.

Norton advertised a "Power Eraser" utility (free) to scan and fix hijacks and it is fingering two SCOPE files, VREC.SYS and 2NIXA.SYS, located in the app/sys/ folder. The files have the same date-stamp as all other SCOPE system files, so I doubt this red flag has any value to it. Don't wanna mess up my Scope install.

Thanks for any pointers. The hijack seems to re-write links on web-pages to take me to advertising pages that can be a pain to close and get rid of.

Gary

Symantec(Norton) was setup by the guy who wrote the original virus so many years ago. that's why they track variants so completely. installing ANY Norton product is darned close to installing malware, even though it will keep you safe from what is commonly thought of as malware. try to remove Norton or Symantec products from your machine completely and you'll see what i mean.

never put any app from any antivirus company on your machine, except for basic antivirus and anti-spyware. i learned this early when i installed various Norton and Macafee products(not necessarily at the same time) that were supposed to improve performance and protect against crashing. needless to say, ALL of these products made crash-o-rama.

Norton is really bad news. use Antivir or AVG or another basic, good antivirus and remove Norton(including all Norton or Symantec entries in the registry) for a happy life. or that's my opinion.....

I agree with Gary, I had to ditch Norton a while back. It was a resource hog!
I've had Avast for a few years now, got it because you can select to disable all the real time protections when you really don't want any disruptions. I have a shortcut to my ethernet port to disable/enable internet activity as necessary.
Avast is pretty good, although lately they have had a little too much self advertising going on for upgrades and i'm not sure if you can disable that. Most of the antivirus/anti malware programs offer a free trial so try some out before you buy to see if it's a good fit for you.
Unfortunately in this day and age you really can't get away with out some form of anti this or that. I built a second hand computer for my kids without any protection on it and within a few weeks it was completely bogged up with adware and viruses. Took a long time to undo it all too, lots of persistent annoying code out there these days!