McAfee false-positive glitch fells PCs worldwide

theregister.co.uk ^

[catnipman]

Yeah, McAfee is a piece-o-crap anyway. Thanks for posting about the bogus CC autocharges. I had a client that reported this and wondered how common it was.

Will be interesting to see if the reported U.K. problem soon manifests itself on this side of the pond.

[catnipman]

Joe, I too think AntiVir is the way to go. I’ve tried the big free three, and think both AVAST and AVG are terrible resource hogs.

Norton products and McAfee products are not even worth considering.

I’ve run across instances of several of the other commercial products like Live OneCare, Webroot Spysweeper and others. And in all cases, simple removal of these products would fix almost all the problems the computer was being brought to me to fix.

[catnipman]

Very few products can remove malware after-the-fact, particularly the programs you mentioned, which are meant to be “preventers”, not removers.

Antimalwarebytes is the best program for after-the-fact removal that I’ve ever seen.

And the Comcast version of McAfee is probably the very absolute worst program to leave running on your computer. Of all the anti-whatever programs, this is the one I see most often cause really strange problems, usually causing access to random web sites to be arbitrarily (and silently) blocked.

[JoeProBono]

Amen. Tried them all and find

most satisfactory and FREE.

[Windflier]

I have Norton on 2 computers now and haven’t noticed any slowdown, but the computers are a laptop and mini that don’t have much other than Office on them

Even if you don't require much of these computers, you would notice a significant increase in processing speed if you removed Norton and replaced it with another a/v program.

One of the problems with Norton, is that it's constantly calling home, checking for updates. At least that's how it used to operate. I haven't used it in over five years now, so maybe they changed that.

Still, I've had nothing but trouble with everything labeled Symantec. Over time, I've deleted every file I could find in my computer related to their software, with resultant improved performance.

[right way right]

I had to reinstall McAfee last friday because it was corrupt.

I only use it because its free with comcast.

I wonder if this is what was up.

[radiohead]

<it’s constantly calling home, checking for updates

Well, that’s no lie. Apparently nothing’s changed there. It is a pain.

[HangThemHigh]

"Very few products can remove malware after-the-fact, particularly the programs you mentioned, which are meant to be “preventers”, not removers."

I didn't really expect the programs to remove the virus, I just wanted to know what it was & hopefully the location of the infected files so I could go after it. That McAfee removed it, when the others didn't seem to know it was there, was a bonus.

I don't intend to leave McAfee on there very long, but the computer is my wife's and mostly used for facebook, games, and, apparently, collecting viruses.