PeaSea Update

[plonq]

Removing all traces of McAfee turned out to be less painful than I had been expecting.  I killed all of its various processes in msconfig and rebooted before I performed the un-install, and it went seamlessly.  There are probably a few DLLs and registry entries lingering about, but I think it's safe to say that my laptop can be certified effectively McAfee-free.

I celebrated by installing the free versions of ZoneAlarm and Avast.  This contrasts to Kerio (paid) and AVG (free) on my desktop system.  I used to run ZoneAlarm on my desktop system, but I dropped it some time back because it conflicted with my new anti-virus program of the day, and because it was a resource hog.  So far this version of ZA appears to be behaving itself, so I'll let it run for awhile.

I'll clear out a bit more pre-installed Dell crap today, but otherwise I think this little computer is ready for prime time.

Comments

[duncandahusky.livejournal.com]

Heh. If there were ever any question about why it would be good to remove McAfee products, here's the answer fresh off this morning's news.

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Not that I needed any positive reinforcement to remove their product from my computer, but this still makes me feel somewhat vindicated.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

What's so wrong about McAfee?
I use ClamAV (whenever I remember to run it anyway), but my mom used McAffee and despite her clicking on everything I tell her not to, her computer appears to be running smoothly and safely
Both of my sisters don't run an antivirus at all x.x

[plonq.livejournal.com]

McAfee in general is a mediocre, resource-hungry application. The one that came on this computer in particular is another animal again. Frequent system-compromising exploits aside...

This is a 30-day trial version of McAfee that they installed. It comes with nag screens, popup ads and the works. Really nasty piece of work. Getting rid of it so that you can install a different virus scanner is another issue again. A simple un-install won't do it - generally it fails partway through or, worse, uninstalls a few components and leaves others running in the background. This leads to all sorts of instability (like BSODs for one).

It also means that you can't install a different virus scanner at that point because they still think that McAfee is installed. I've had help calls from people whose machines wouldn't even boot up at this stage. The solution was ultimate to manually unregister DLLs, nuke a few dozen registry entries and manually delete program directories.

Fortunately I managed to find a workaround using msconfig that let me disable all of the running components before I did the un-install.

[furahi.livejournal.com]

msconfig is a wonderful thing.

My mom's computer runs very smoothly and fast, given its age (It's a Pentium-III, 1Ghz).
Really to me it sounds like you're describing Norton Anti-virus ;)

We have a say here that goes something like "Everyone tells how they did at the party". I guess I've been lucky with McAfee and/or unlucky with Norton

[plonq.livejournal.com]

Don't even get me started on Norton... =/

[furahi.livejournal.com]

Back in the MS-DOS days, Norton Utilities saved me many-a-times, so I forgive their newer crappy products ^^