McAfee - don't, just don't

I thought I would post this for anyone considering going for McAfee anti-virus/security stuff, by way of a warning.

Last year, my lovely mum bought herself a new HP laptop and the shites that are PC World sold her all sorts that she simply did not need (by the time I found out it was too late), one of which was McAfee Security at the extortionate price of £80!

She has been having some problems in recent weeks, which in short is due to McAfee blocking ports and stopping connections to printers and other network devices. As the annual renewal will be due very shortly, the opportunity arose to get rid of McAfee and solve some of the grief at the same time; I have extended my ESET licence, so my mum's PC will be covered under my subscription (£40 a year for multiple computers), and at long last she will get freedom from the bloat that is McAfee.

Since 10am this morning, I have been remotely connected to my mums PC trying to get McAfee out, using their own removal tool; it has hung God knows how many times now, and simply will not complete the uninstall. Worse still, it has left a process behind that either stalls other attempts to run the removal tool again, or prevents other files from updating. I have tried every which way but loose, and this damned thing will not play ball at all.

Now, I am in the process of backing the laptop up to my server, and then I am going to reinstall Windows (with the help of my lovely mum) just to get this pile of garbage out of her system for once and for all.

If you are considering McAfee - don't. End of.

 

You are lucky then - bloomin' resource hog as far as I am concerned.

£6.98 too expensive

 

No, it was done by the shysters at PC World

 

I will double check with her regarding the auto-renew @Scrungee - better to be safe than sorry.

This particular McAfee has caused no end of grief, so much so that I remotely burned a copy of W10 onto a disc, and have since talked my mum through getting into the BIOS to change the boot order, and then to boot to the DVD to install Windows from scratch (which it is currently doing); once Windows is installed, TeamViewer will be next to allow me to install ESET and then everything else for her. Ten hours so far - not funny.

 

@fat controller I agree with Scrungee. You need to check carefully what may be happening in way of payments.

Also, you need to tell her bank that you don't authorise any automatic payments (Direct Debits etc.) apart from ones that you should list and give to the bank. You should be able to get those from her bank statements.

Talk to the bank and explain that you think that she, as an elderly person, may have been persuaded to sign something she didn't understand.

 

No ongoing subscription, although they did try at the time; thank goodness my lovely mum had that part of her brain switched on at the time.

By way of an update, getting shot of this and all its problems ended up with a clean re-install of Windows - great fun to do remotely, especially when the first bootable Windows disc is corrupt and stalls at 94% installed after having formatted the hard drive! The good news is, the laptop is now running better than it ever has, and is covered under my ESET licence for antivirus, with Malwarebytes picking up the remainder.