Uninstalling Symantec products

You’ve decided to replace your Norton Security or similar Symantec protection programme by a competitor’s. However, what you might not know is that uninstalling the programme by selecting Add/Remove programs in Windows Control Panel is not enough and may cause problems when installing a new antivirus software programme.

Therefore you should download the uninstaller.exe utility available for free on Symantec website. Running this utility only takes a few seconds.

You can then install your new antivirus programme after rebooting your system.

Now suppose you forgot to purge the Bin on your Windows desktop before uninstalling Norton Security and eventually decide to defrag your hard drive. That’s where you may be in trouble: since you didn’t purge the Bin, a hidden folder called C:\RECYCLER\NPROTECT was left on your hard disk. It contains a copy of files you deleted when you last emptied the Bin. They no longer appeared in the Bin, but Norton allowed you to restore them if needed as long as you hadn’t purged the Bin. However, this folder can contain several gigabytes of useless data using disk space you’d probably like to recover.

Now you have uninstalled your Norton utilities and installed a new protection software programme instead. So it seems you’re stuck. You’re even considering what seems to be the logical thing to do, i.e. uninstalling the new software and reinstall the Norton programme just because you want to run a command that'll take a split second?

Don’t panic. Here’s a simple procedure to follow: on your Windows desktop, select Start, Programmes, Accessories and then Command prompt. This will open a black window with the Windows command prompt. On Windows XP, it’ll probably display something like C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator>

All you have to do now is type exactly the following command:

rmdir /s \\?\C:\RECYCLER\NPROTECT

When prompted to confirm your choice, just type y (for yes). The hidden folder \recycler\nprotect is then deleted altogether and you’ll probably find you’ve recovered several gigabytes of hard disk space