(no subject)

[plonq]

I checked the Purolator tracking site, and it looks like my new computer arrived in town around 1:00 this morning.  Unless they mishandle the package, it should be available for me to pick up sometime after dinner this evening.

My excitement is only tempered by the foreknowledge of all the crap I'll have to remove from it before it's usable.  McAfee is the worst.  When I was ordering these machines, there was a point where you could choose which McAfee product you wanted installed, but not having it installed at all was not an option.

If you have ever tried to remove all traces of the fecal smear that their anti-virus product leaves on your hard drive you'll understand my consternation over the task before me.  In my experience, McAfee is more invasive and destructive than many of the viruses and Trojans that it purports to protect against.

"... then reboot into Safe Mode.  Manually delete this folder, and that folder.  Use regsvr32 to manually unregister the following DLLs..."

Ah well - it's all stuff that only has to be done once.

Comments

[leopanthera.livejournal.com]

I had to remove McAfee from my Dad's Dell. I discovered the trick is to manually disable each component of the software, before attempting to uninstall it. This is annoying, but it did work, and saved me from having to venture into Safe World.

It's annoying that you can't just wipe and do a clean install of Windows anymore. XP is usually pre-activated and will need activating again if you do, and often they don't supply you with all the drivers you need, or sometimes even a Windows CD!

Grr. :)

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Fortunately I spent the extra $10 and had them ship the XP install disks along with the systems. It's sorely tempting to just do a clean format and reinstall, but I'll see how the virus - er, McAfee removal goes first. -_-

Hey, don't kvetch...

[ionotter.livejournal.com]

I just had to install AOL on my machine so I can connect from home. Try getting THAT off your machine without a low-level format! Honestly, I don't think you *can* do a low-level format on a XP machine anymore...

I've made a restore point, but I'm not betting that it'll work.

Re: Hey, don't kvetch...

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

You can wipe a partition using the partioning CD that comes with WD or Maxtor hard drives. And all the garbage they put on a storebought computer today is one reason I prefer to build my own from scratch.

Re: Hey, don't kvetch...

[plonq.livejournal.com]

I briefly toyed with the idea of building these from scratch, but laptops are a bit trickier than desktops - and Dell offered pretty good hardware for the money.

atara installed Halflife 2 on hers, and though it initially complained that her 2GHz processor was too slow for its liking, it ran as fast as ever.