Re: Make McAfee Go Away

gray.wizard_at_moria.mines
Date: 11/23/05 

Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2005 09:36:17 -0600

On Wed, 23 Nov 2005 07:23:19 -0700, Bill Dolgen <billdolgen@gazeta.pl>
wrote:

>I tried booting to safe mode and again attempting the
>Add/Remove stuff, but to no avail. I could search the
>registry and delete all references, also deleting the various
>folders, but I was hoping for something less drastic.

Bill,
I know you were hoping for something less drastic & believe me when I
tell you that if we had any other solution we'd be quick to tell you.
However, unfortunately for you, McAfee only cares about getting their
crapware on your computer. They don't have much interest in giving
people a way to escape their personal brand of hell. The marginal
uninstall routing is only there to keep people from screaming too loud
and for tech support to tell people to perform if there's a problem
upgrading to the next version of crapware.

Your only other option is to set aside a couple hours to scour through
the registry removing every reference to McAfee that you find & then
manually deleting the corresponding file off your hard drive. That's
the only other course of action that can be performed when an
uninstall routine fails you. It's a tiresome grueling process & it's
really easy to miss something so there's no guarantee that when you're
done you will have exterminated everything. That's why the
recommendations for a re-format. It'll save you a lot of time,
trouble, and head-ache in the long run. It wasn't just a snap
recommendation to get you out of our hair & give you busy work to do.

I always recommend people who buy mass-marketed computers to re-format
and install a fresh copy of Windows anyway. There is most likely other
crap-ware lurking around on that hard drive that was bundled with your
PC which you'd probably be better off without.

Relevant Pages