Sophos AV Nightmare.

I have tested many antivirus. There’s always a “catch”, something I don’t like about them, so I switch to the “next”. But this awful Sophos AV is the King of the Dreadful.

First of all, you cannot disable it, and adding exceptions is a huge PITA. So I wanted to uninstall it, and then it’s when the nightmare began.

Unlike the other 99.99999% of available software, you cannot just uninstall it. If you try (via Control Panel) you get a “To uninstall Sophos you must restart the computer first.” message. That’s the first time EVER I have seen something like that in my entire life. And other Antivirus aren’t like that, so we cannot say it’s because the process is “very important” or something like that.

Well, so I did, I restarted my computer and tried again. It lasted some minutes and then: “Uninstallation failed.” message pops out and just like that I cannot uninstall a software on my PC. Just like that, the software tells you to “go fuck yourself, this ain’t your computer, you don’t decide what software you uninstall”.

So I thought, if I boot my computer in Safe Mode I will be able to, and so I did, but again same message. You cannot uninstall it even on Safe Mode. So I just tried to delete the Folder contents inside Program Files with no luck. There were being used ina  process, so I checked the Task Manager and found a single Sophos process. I don’t remember the name, but I End Task’ed it. Fortunately that was enough and I could delete the Sophos Folder.

I thought the nightmare was over and so I rebooted my computer to see that the Sophos AV was still running. It seems there are 2 Folders with Sophos binaries in them. The one in Program Files and another one in another location I cannot remember. So I, again, ended the process and deleted that other Folder.

A very big adventure to uninstall a not even good antivirus… I felt my computer was kidnapped by that shady software.

So, Do not ever use that awful software! That’s my advice. See you later ♥