Doppleganger
07-11-2007, 12:49 AM
I'm pretty confident McAfee is actually a phonetic contraction of "make a fee" and that virus scan programs don't actually work. Well, they do work - they're exceptionally skilled at spamming one's computer and bugging one to spend large amounts of money on a placebo service.
My beef with McAffe has been longstanding, at least since 2002-2003 when I had one of their trashy virus scans and updated almost daily, yet never ran into problems until my warantee period expired. As in, the day of. I never used the scanning software anyway and disabled it during start up and never did scans, yet when I had to renew I got hit by spam. No virii but annoying enough as is.
So I switched to the lesser of two evils, Norton, which is more indescriminate with this kind of deal but served me (reasonably) well. But Norton is expensive and only exists on my table-top PC - Dell Computers, who made this horrible laptop I'm using, installed McAffe instead of Norton on my computer and so I was stuck with it.
Once again, my "trial" period (bullcrack, I paid for this) has expired for the software, and McAffe wants me to penny up $60 for each of their services I didn't use simply to activate the software again. As in, it's not even turned on right now, I've got to pay ('verify your Dell account with McAffe') to get my bloody program running again.
And while McAfee isn't the best virus scan, this version was at least more competent than the one from several years ago. But I disabled it as well and, like before, had little trouble until the "trial period" ran out.
Now I can barely type for five minutes without a slew of pop-ups appearing from "adbrite". I'm operating on full pop-up blocker for IE and my cookie setting is on high, but nothing seems to work.
Conclusion: virus scans are scams anyway, but McAffe is the king of failure.
My beef with McAffe has been longstanding, at least since 2002-2003 when I had one of their trashy virus scans and updated almost daily, yet never ran into problems until my warantee period expired. As in, the day of. I never used the scanning software anyway and disabled it during start up and never did scans, yet when I had to renew I got hit by spam. No virii but annoying enough as is.
So I switched to the lesser of two evils, Norton, which is more indescriminate with this kind of deal but served me (reasonably) well. But Norton is expensive and only exists on my table-top PC - Dell Computers, who made this horrible laptop I'm using, installed McAffe instead of Norton on my computer and so I was stuck with it.
Once again, my "trial" period (bullcrack, I paid for this) has expired for the software, and McAffe wants me to penny up $60 for each of their services I didn't use simply to activate the software again. As in, it's not even turned on right now, I've got to pay ('verify your Dell account with McAffe') to get my bloody program running again.
And while McAfee isn't the best virus scan, this version was at least more competent than the one from several years ago. But I disabled it as well and, like before, had little trouble until the "trial period" ran out.
Now I can barely type for five minutes without a slew of pop-ups appearing from "adbrite". I'm operating on full pop-up blocker for IE and my cookie setting is on high, but nothing seems to work.
Conclusion: virus scans are scams anyway, but McAffe is the king of failure.