Pro's and con's of having a Norton package on your PC?

Newcad

File shredders (and drive wipers) just overwrite the previous data with random characters so that it can't be recovered by (non-forensic) recovery software.

SSDs use different technology to HDDs and TRIM and garbage collection (collectively called wear levelling) mean that such overwriting is not necessary for a SSD.

(Except possibly for an external SSD. TRIM is an ATA command so cannot be issued over common external connections such as USB, garbage collection will still happen but not as often so some deleted data may be recoverable from an external SSD).

bob2302

Newcad said:

File shredders (and drive wipers) just overwrite the previous data with random characters so that it can't be recovered by (non-forensic) recovery software.

The point is that on an SSD the shedder ends up writing into different blocks, not the blocks holding the data.

SSDs use different technology to HDDs and TRIM and garbage collection (collectively called wear levelling) 

Sort of, wear levelling includes more than that.

(Except possibly for an external SSD. TRIM is an ATA command so cannot be issued over common external connections such as USB, garbage collection will still happen but not as often so some deleted data may be recoverable from an external SSD).

Some USB external SSDs do support TRIM, but TRIM is just information sent to the drive, there are no guarantees. 

Supatramp

Whenever I buy a new computer/laptop, and it comes with Norton installed, the first thing I do is uninstall it. Right away!