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.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2006-08-01 05:00 pm (UTC)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.