A Bit Annoyed With McAfee

[mosaix]

Been using McAfee for some years now and any problems have been resolved free using their online chat service and their technicians loggin in and resolving issues.

Anyway, my laptop has been slowing down for some time. I've been fixing things using msconfig, getting rid of stuff that I don't need to be running all the time. But recently my CPU usage has been 100% even when I've not been running anything - an svchost.exe hogging all the cycles for apparently no reason.

A couple of days ago I started getting a pop-up from McAfee that my firewall was turned off. I'd turn it on again but 15 minutes later it was off again.

Searched a few forums and the common answer seemed to be it's a virus and contact McAfee to resolve the issue. Went to their website and the charge £59.99 for the service!! This to fix an issue with product that I pay an annual licence fee for!!

McAfee say "no anti-virus software is 100% perfect blah blah." However this issue with the virus is not new, some forums are referring to it as long ago as 2009. Surely if a McAfee technician knows how to fix it then they could build it into the software? Sounds like McAfee have discovered a useful revenue stream by not fixing the issue.

Anyway, to cut a long story short I loaded malwarebytes (had to go to several download sites before I found a version that wasn't infected with a virus ) and ran that. It found 7 issues not previously spotted by McAfee but the firewall on/off issue remained. Next on the list was roguekiller (again many infected sites ). This found 6 more issues.

McAfee firewall now okay and the machine boots up and runs like lightening.

 

[The Judge]

We've got McAfee as it's part of a BT package, but we're not over-enamoured with it -- my other half says it never gets good reviews in the magazines he reads. It's appalling they're charging for a service they should already be providing, though.

I've got Malwarebytes, but only a freebie version. If it isn't a silly question, how do you know if the version is or isn't infected with its own virus? (You've got me worried now...) I've not come across roguekiller. Presumably you think it's worth it if it found more problems. Any chance you can link to the non-virus site you found for it? Ta.

 

[mosaix]

I've got Malwarebytes, but only a freebie version. If it isn't a silly question, how do you know if the version is or isn't infected with its own virus? (You've got me worried now...)

Strangely, it was McAfee that warned me that the download was infected.

I've not come across roguekiller. Presumably you think it's worth it if it found more problems. Any chance you can link to the non-virus site you found for it? Ta.

I went to so many sites, T.J., that I doubt if I could find it again, but I'll give it a try.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I used to use McAfee, but now I use Avast! - which has a free version that is more than adequate.

I switched precisely because Avast! picked up a serious infection which McAfee hadn't even noticed:
http://www.avast.com/en-us/index

 

[Karn Maeshalanadae]

To be honest, Mosaix, don't even try to bother with paid security programs. Like Brian, I use Avast! free for years and it's always done its job for me. Of course, over the last few versions they've been trying to give a free month or so of upgraded software, which is a real wonker to remove once it expires, but it's easy to say no to.


For once in a while scans for possible cleanups, Mo, I would also recommend you download Malwarebyte's Antimalware. It's faster for once-in-a-while scans than Avast!.


It does not, however, have around-the-clock protection-it's merely a scanner and remover, so for internet security, Avast! is just fine.



By the way, I'm sure that Antimalware pickup was really just a false positive. It's best to download things like it, though, from reputable sites.

 

[Dozmonic]

I've only ever had a virus from someone that used multiple virus programs.

I will, sometimes, use trend micro housecall, which is a free one. I think AVG used to have a free scan that I'd use, along with Spybot search and destroy. On the whole, I prefer to browse safely, using firefox with NoScript add-on. I don't use outlook for email either, so without IE and outlook, and not allowing scripts to run indiscriminately, I'm a virus free zone.

 

[Vertigo]

We adopted Avast Pro in my company after several (start up) years being very happy with the free version. Just recently we had a new computer which had come with an evaluation copy of McAfee which I ripped off, as I do pretty much all of such programs on new computers. However it turned out I didn't do a good enough job of it.

This new computer would always connect to the network alright but we use named pipes for inter-process communications and sometimes this computer would connect to these pipes and sometimes it just refused to see them. Spent ages checking every single network setting. plugging into different network switch boxes, etcetera, etcetera. Finally I learnt that Windows Firewall (which I always disable on all our computers) can cause problems with named pipes. Went and had a look and sure enough it was turned on, but I couldn't change the settings as they were being 'managed' by McAfee Security. Dived back in and made sure I'd ripped McAfee out properly this time and lo and behold everything now works perfectly.

I don't care to think how much time the employee whose computer it was and I wasted on this but I will certainly not be letting McAfee anywhere near any of our computers again.