How To Totally Uninstall Any Antivirus Program

I've been asked by my chat friend recently on how to install another antivirus product after uninstall another one. He says, "why I cannot install Kaspersky Antivirus after I uninstall ESET NOD32 Antivirus, the pop up appears and says my computer has already install another antivirus program". Well, I took a time to think about it because ESET products doesn't have that kind of uninstalling problems before, not like other antivirus program such as Kaspersky, AVG or McAfee.

Even the antivirus company did released their removal tool to help uninstall their programs completely, you need to have an extra procedure to make it perfect. Here's how the problem was solved and I think you could apply these steps to other antivirus too such as I've mentioned above.

If you're already uninstall the antivirus that gave problems to you, just reinstall it back and follow the steps to uninstall, and for this tutorial, I'll be using ESET NOD32 refer to my friend solutions.

Uninstall
1. Right click on ESET NOD32 icon at Taskbar Tray, click to disable the 'Realtime Protections'.

2. Click Start > Run > type-in services.msc > Ok
3. At Services, find all services related to ESET, double click it, click the dropdown menu at startup type and click disable, click Apply and Ok. Do that to all ESET services that you've found.

4. Right click on empty space at Taskbar and choose Start Task Manager.
5. At Task manager window, click Processes tab > click Show processes from all user that located at the bottom of Task Manager window, find all processes related to ESET, highlight it and click End Process.

6. Now, you can start uninstall ESET NOD32 Antivirus from Add or Remove Programs or from Start menu. Reboot your computer after uninstall complete.

Using Removal Tool

1. After computer restart, double click the NOD32 Removal Tool to run it and follow the removal instructions. If you are using Windows Vista or Windows 7, please right click the tool and choose "Run as administrator".
2. Reboot again for changes to take effect.

Clean Extra Leftovers
1. Click start > Run > type-in regedit > Ok
2. At Registry Editor Tool, click Edit > Find > and type-in ESET > click Find Next, delete all related registry strings related to ESET. You must do a registry backup first before making any registry deletions. Or you can use other tools that easily find a registry strings such as RegSeeker.

3. Using Windows Search, search the files and folders related to ESET, still by using ESET as keyword, delete all that found but make sure search for hidden files and folders are enabled.
4. Reboot again.