Archive for the ‘Computers-Internet’ Category

I removed McAfee from my computers 6 days ago.

Today I see that Intel bought McAfee for $7.68 billion.  Not that it matters anymore because it’s too fucking late, but I hope to God that the Intel engineers are better with software usability than McAfee is.  I’d start by firing every fucking one of McAfee’s programmers.

I have fucking had it with McAfee antivirus.  Ever since that new major upgrade earlier this year, nothing works right.  I have 3 licenses.  On one of my computers, every time that McAfee notification pops up telling me it just updated, I can’t click the the buttons on the notification to make the window go away.  Click, click, click, nothing happens.  I end up either moving the window off the edge of the screen or rebooting.  Even when I go into the setup, none of the buttons work.  When a program needs permission to access the internet, I can’t give it rights because…you guessed it, none of the fucking buttons work.    

The absolute last straw was when I tried to remove it from my computer this morning.  Went to the control panel to Add/Remove programs.  I get a warning that it will uninstall it and I’ll have no virus protection.  I click Remove and the buttons disappear and nothing happens.  It just sits there like rock.  I couldn’t even delete the folders off the computer because files were in use.  It’s like trying to get rid of an ex-wife when you had kids together.  I’m tired of my computers being held prisoner by their bloatware. 

After a little research, I did find away to get it off.  Long story short, go Google “mcafee removal tool”.  I downloaded it, ran it, and FINALLY it’s off my system.

I installed the free version of Avast instead.  We’ll see what happens.  It sure as fuck can’t be any worse because even though real-time scanning was on, every week when I ran a full scan, it always found viruses.  Beats me wtf they were because I also couldn’t figure out how to find that out, either.

Already that computer is running faster.  However, now I see the free version is only good for 30 days.  Fuckers.  Time to go back to AVG where free really means free.

WTF is it with anti-virus software?  Every time there’s a major upgrade it gets harder to configure, doesn’t catch viruses when it should and leaks (memory) like a used whore at the end of a long night of, well, whoring. 

McAfee did a redesign in the Spring of 2010.  In the previous version, it was impossible to find what I was looking for because none of the menu entries made logical sense.  Do these guys ever bother to do user feasability studies?  That’s one of the biggest must dos in designing a website or chunk of software.  If people can’t find what they’re looking for they’ll leave or won’t use it.

I had high hopes the new version was going to be better, but it totally hosed my computer.  I spent a solid weekend and then some recovering from a fucked up install.  I couldn’t get the computer to boot up.  Thank goodness I was able to restore it to the last working setup.  Luckily I have another computer in my home office to even get on the internet to research it.  Then right after I got everything working again, I got hit with some really nasty viruses, malware, spyware, you name it.  It took SuperAntiSpyware and MalwareBytes to get rid of it all.

Once McAfee was correctly setup, it was once again impossible to navigate the new navigation system.  Again, nothing makes sense, but what really frosts my ass is that you can drill down into the navigation, but you can’t back out.  Instead, you have to start all the way over and drill down again and hopefully you don’t go past where you want to be or you have to do it all over again.

And boy, does it ever leak memory!  If my computer sits idle for any length of time, McAfee takes over and starts sucking up resources.  It takes forever to wake up the screen.  I sit there wiggling that mouse like a little adolescent boy jerking off in the bathroom.  Yesterday I looked at the System Processes that were running and McAfee was over a million K.  I had to stop the process and then restart it to get it to release the memory. 

It’s always turned on yet it detects nothing in real-time, but when I run my weekly virus scan, it finds 2 to 4 viruses.  Oh, and forget about finding out what they were because I can figure out how to do it in that fucked up navigation.  The big question is, why isn’t it catching them in real-time?  Who the fuck knows what kind of damage is being done all week long while those things are on my computer.

So now I’m running Stinger and it found exploit-cve-2010-2568 trojan in the damn Recycle Bin of all places.  WTF???

And this really pisses me off, too.  My McAfee subscription is on auto-renew, but instead of sending out an email like a week ahead of time to warn me about it SO I CAN FUCKING CANCEL IT, it just automatically gets charged to my credit card and I’m stuck with the bitch for another year.  At least this version tells me when it’s going to expire…provided I can find that again in the navigation.  Get the shovel.