The Lemon Fool

Evening all
My laptop came with 365 and McAfee antivirus installed
I have since removed 365 and installed Office 2021
Although the McAfee subscription ended 9 months(?) ago I'm still getting regular pop ups asking me to renew.
Windows Defender is running and all looks OK

Is there any benefit in leaving McAfee installed, or can I just delete it? The pop-ups are very 'sticky' and hang around for a while before I can close them

The first thing I do with any new PC is update Windows Defender, then delete any bundled security products.

The weakest point of any security system tends to be the user, and whlst I am by no stretch of the imagination an expert, I do apply common sense when it comes to links and emails.

Our elderly neighbour emailed me yesterday asking for "a favour", signing off with"love and hugs XXX", which seemed somewhat out of character and completely unlike any other email she has sent (it seems scammers don't look in the 'sent' folder for inspiration). I popped around and she ashamedly admitted she'd just been on the phone to "Windows Support" We closed her laptop down and the village IT chap is coming in the morning.

AleisterCrowley wrote:Evening all
My laptop came with 365 and McAfee antivirus installed....
....Is there any benefit in leaving McAfee installed, or can I just delete it? The pop-ups are very 'sticky' and hang around for a while before I can close them

McAfee (along with most other 3rd-party AVs) can be very tricky to uninstall fully. Like the other major AVs, McAfee provide a removal tool, the McAfee Consumer Product Removal tool (MCPR).


https://www.mcafee.com/support/?article ... ticle-view

It's been a year or six since I finally exorcised the zombie McAfee pop-up that had infected my computer since I bought a program suite from Argos. (I forget which one. ) Microsoft's uninstaller under Settings didn't lay the unquiet ghost for long, and nor did it help when I deleted the directory in which its files resided.

Weirdly, what worked was to click the start button and then scroll down until I came to ..... a McAfee uninstaller routine! Which I'd never noticed was there. Presumably that's the same routine that Bree has just mentioned? I followed through with an optimisation routine which could find no trace of the program. Honour was finally satisfied, and I've been clean ever since.

As for John McAfee... https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sp ... 023-09-29/

BJ

Breelander wrote:McAfee (along with most other 3rd-party AVs) can be very tricky to uninstall fully. Like the other major AVs, McAfee provide a removal tool, the McAfee Consumer Product Removal tool (MCPR).


https://www.mcafee.com/support/?article ... ticle-view

Thank you for this information and link. I "uninstalled" McAfee when I got my new laptop in favour of different anti-virus software, which worked fine, except that every couple of weeks, McAfee pops up to ask me to complete the install/setup. Hopefully, running the tool in the link has got rid of this annoyance.

I haven't tried it yet... I'm going to back all my files up first, in case it does a spiteful deletion of all my data..
Not that I'm paranoid. If I were, I'd bury myself in sand on the beach and put a cardboard box over my head. Just like John McAfee did.
[edit: although he was, perhaps, behaving rationally based on later mysterious events]