Somehow, McAfee Firewall appeared on my computer. It seems to be rather impervious to being removed.
I will dig into how to get this unwanted piece of shit program removed. This seems to be consistent with how that stinking company works; they somehow get shit onto your system and they make it as hard as hell to get rid of it. I don't know what they gain from that, for they seem to have the morals of a bunch of Indian hackers who call up elderly folks and say "theyre's a problem with your Windows computer" and ask to have remote access enabled.
It seems weirdly appropriate that the founder of the company died in prison.
Cat Pawtector!
2 hours ago
9 comments:
I've been using Linux Mint 19.3 on my PC and on my elderly daddy's laptop and desktop ever since I had to claw back $450 from his credit union account from scammers. Yes, he let them in after they took over his desktop. He was so ashamed he wanted to let them keep it. Linux is inherently more secure that any Win version and twice the ease of use compared to Windoze. That's because Linux is your pal and not corporate spy/ malware, phoning home to Redmond/ DC TLAs and marketing vampires. Installs in 20 minutes and works pretty much like the last 'good' MS version, #7, minus the spying/ reporting code. No need to run Windows unless you have special software needs. You'll never go back to OS servitude after using Linux, any version shows Win to be the trash code it is.
I remember years ago trying to uninstall AOL. Man, that was a task. They were everywhere in the system. I'd get it all cleaned up, I thought, and bam, another error code due to some lost AOL file.
Now, I love my Chromebook. If it Fk's up bad enough, Toss it, and for like under 200 bucks get a new one. And I don't need additional Anti Virus.
w3ski
I considered Chromebook for daddy (on hospice now but not for long I hope- bone cancer), no virus worries, cheap, instant restore, fine for light use. But it's 100% Web centric, no PC if no connection: latency, probably even more invisible black box spy/ malware. And less capable than any random used boxen bought on CL cheap and Linux powered. But I get the allure, gotta have a tiny modicum of MadSkilz to change your OS, Lusers. (Sorry, my tech support persona popped out there for a second- dealing with you users has made me deeply cynical. Have you tried turning it off and back on?)
I've run Windows in Mac Pro VM throughout the years. There are some programs I use for design and cannot do without, unfortunately. In 8 years never had any malware get in and Win is actually more stable. Never had a crash through all the upgrades (which are necessary due to application "upgrades".
McAfee did get into my work computer once and the IT department struggled to squash it. It's parasitical and invades every part of the machine. Sort of like Covid invades the body. I ended getting new unit so they could nuke the hard drive.
I hope you have your files well backed up.
For the spousal unit's most recent hospital stay (she's home, yay!) I bought a hundred dollar Chromebook and downloaded a free talk to text app because that's too simple for a hospital complex with a ten million dollar a year tech budget. Everyone thought it was great: doctors, nurses, therapists, staff; all wondered why they didn't do something like that*. And because it's only artificial, not intelligent, the mistranslations can be quite humorous;)
*Not secure ~ has the potential of providing a transcript
When I got this machine second hand from my friend Sara, it had a program called Webroot on it, and nothing I tried could get rid of it. After about a year, the machine slowed down to the point of being unusable, and I bribed my computer genius friend with a homemade cheeseburger made from Betty's cows to try and salvage it.
It took him all night, but the next morning it worked fine, and the goddamn Webroot program was gone.
I haven't run an antivirus program since my XP machine, which needed antivirus and antispyware programs to reliably operate.
Every Windows version since 7 has been more secure and less in need of more protection than Windows provides.
Back in the 2000s, I tried to like Linux. Briana worked for ACCRC, who took cast off computers, stripped them for parts, and built new machines out of them, which they then loaded with Ubuntu and gave away to people (mostly schoolkids) who couldn't afford a computer. I traded work and pallets for used computers from them.
I had a Ubuntu box, a dual-boot setup with Ubuntu on my XP box, and being a poor musician, another box with a Debian distro called 64 Studio, which was supposedly specifically designed for digital multimedia.
A few hundred hours in I reluctantly came to the conclusion that while I had indeed taught myself to use command lines, writing them while trying to make music was far more difficult and produced far inferior results to the free software on my XP box, or the pirated copy of Abelton Live running on the oldest, slowest (350mhz) G4 Mac in existence ( the "YIKES") and I gave up my quest for free digital music operating systems. I imagine that it could have been made to work if you had an engineer running it for you while you made the music, but if I could have afforded to hire an engineer, I wouldn't have needed a free operating system to begin with.
-Doug in Sugar Pine
I'm at the other end....
I feel over the decades I've been screwed enough with
mickyspooge and their crap software. So back in 2007
after the NT4 mess I ad to jump. At that time it was
WIN2k or XP. in all of that I'd played with linux but
never felt it was ready for prime time. After looking
again I went to Ubuntu and never looked back.
The learning curve was not bad for me as I had Unix BSD2.11,
VMS, RT11, RSTS, and RSX and others under my belt so whats
one more with Linux. Finding software to do what I wanted
was the big thing and once I learned how to look. Since then
I'd found its easy to maintain if you know how and that
got easier to find how to do it.
Linus over time has become more complete for useful software
and user friendly.
I'd also acquired a MacBook (2008) via work and still
have it but its an antique now (cant update). It was
comfortable to use as its core is unix like so nothing
foreign even if different GUI. That's nearing retireent.
So between Ubuntu and Mint Linux I keep the hounds at bay
and do the things I want and need to do on low powered systems.
That does not help EBM, Winders is a monolithic beast and how
to do things is mostly guess and by golly. What worse is you
say win10 but between time and updates its not the same beast
that was launched and screens and tools change. That makes
working with it when cranky is a moving dot on the wall.
Eck!
Probable user error - correct and resubmit
https://www.lifewire.com/how-to-uninstall-mcafee-4570965
Contact me if you are truly stumped.
I installed Linux Peppermint on my old, expendable Netbook computer, but I can't figure out how to use Clam AV, and I won't run a computer without an anti-malware program. That "Linux doesn't need AV" line is yesterday's news.
Linux is probably great for people who were taught in school how to use computers, but it's not user-friendly enough for an antique flatulence of 58.
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