Finally succumbed to the inevitable, and totally removed all vestiges of MacAfee Security Center from my main lab PC. I had done this earlier on all of my other (Dell) computers, but was caving to MacAfee scare tactics before wiping it on the Big Boy. MacAfee did not go quietly into oblivion, I had to do a somewhat lengthy software removal, then edit my startup and registry to exclude any reference to McAfee, then do a hard reboot before it finally went away. Hopefully for good, but ya never know.
Gone are the constant daily update nag boxes, the glacial re-boot and shut-down times, the seemingly endless "scans" which effectively hijacked the CPU and ran the hard drive for hours. Also gone are the targeted advertisements that stemmed from cookies on my hard drive. Finally came to the conclusion that these alledged MacAfee updates and scans were nothing more than data-mining opportunities to log my internet usage and provide data to third parties.
All of my other PC's (which like this one are all running Windows XP) were lightning fast except this lab computer. I finally figured out why. Doh! And I was actually paying a yearly subscription for this intrusion and loss of time and production. My DSL provider has a pretty thorough firewall, and I just run Windows Security Essentials on other computers, (which seems to work great and is free) but have MalwareBytes available too, so I think I'm good to go now.
Is this just my impression or has anyone else had the same experience with MacAfee? Would like to know how the general run of BeerLeggers feel on this subject. I probably would never have bought that P.O.S. software, but it came preloaded (as bloatware) on this particular Dell PC, and I was gullible enough to deal with it for the last 3 years.
out, BC
Yes, only couple that with Vista as an OS. It got to the point the CPU never stopped running, everything ran at snail's pace until you began using an application, then it cleared up.
I left a lot of money on the table as well, still have a paid subscription for 5 machines through 2012. The kids are still using it with Windows 7, although both sons prefer open source stuff and it runs fine within their systems. I never loaded it on the XP machine, use Essentials for that and no problems.
Horrible software. I use avast! and have malware bytes along just in case and have had no problems at all. If I were to buy a package though it would be Kasperski, it's powerful however the caveat is that it learns and it'll secure things you use (like port 80).
Yes, I ran it once on my PC at home even though I knew it was bloatware. I got rid of it about 6 months later. I use Malwarebytes, SuperAntispyware, and Spybot, all of which are free and work very well.
Congratulations!
(said after double-checking it wasn't Hub Northing making the declaration....;-)
Nothing but Avast and SuperAntispyware on my XP machine for years. Never had a single intrusion that wasn't immediately ravaged by one or the other. Never notice any CPU downtime running either. Avast is the discovery real powerhouse. SAS performs the best scan cleanups.
JBS
Screwed up and did not update my Malware ...
Got zapped this past weekend with a new "anti-virus" software package that shut down my computer. Spent a half-hour trying to get past it and it still was forcing me to pay $59.95 to register or my system would not work. It kept disabling my copy of Malware and continued to "pop" each time it did it. Damned irritating.
The Network Manager is now undoing all that crap off of my computer today, but I was unable to get anything done this past weekend.
Those 10 weeks of Engineer Demolition School a long time ago certainly had me fantasizing for a while ... 🙂
