The One With Aldacron

Recently I purchased a subscription for McAfee VirusScan online. I had been running without virus protection for quite a while. Years ago I had Norton (and actually still have the disc), but I’m certain I can’t use that anymore. My last AV experience had been with Trend Micro’s PC-Cillin, only because it came with my harddrive when I built my computer. What a nightmare that was.

For over a week after I installed PC-Cillin every online game I played ran terribly. At the time I had just built a new computer with upper midrange hardware and was going bonkers trying to figure out what was wrong. It turned out that PC-Cillin comes with a program that sniffs all data that comes and goes on the network, looking for malicious content. There was no sign of that component during installation, nor any indication that it was installed by default. The guide I had didn’t even mention it. It took quite a bit of searching to find out what the problem was. Once I knew, I disabled it and all was almost well - PC-Cillin never would shut off. I finally got fed up with it and decided to uninstall it. It wouldn’t uninstall. I got rid of it shortly thereafter through formatting the hard drive.

I’ve been leery of trying any other antivirus software ever since, but since I knew I needed something, and McAfee VirusScan was available online, I went for it. At first I was quite satisfied. I noticed that it was causing problems for some software I use, but it was possible to disable both VirusScan and the ‘Security Center’ that McAfee installs with all of their products. All was well. Then the other day I received an automatic update. Suddenly, I found myself back in that nightmare world.

VirusScan 10 was upgraded to version 11. That wasn’t the problem. I could still disable VS through the Security Center (or so it appeared at first). Unfortunately, the new verison of the security center provides no means of shutting off the Security Center itself. A quick look at the running processes showed me that there were 7 or 8 McAfee processes running in the background eating up several megabytes of memory. I have two gigs of RAM on this box, so there’s plenty to spare. But a program that I can’t shutdown aggravates me. No matter how much ram it eats it’s RAM that’s wasted. Besides, although I had already disabled VirusScan, there was still a ’scanner’ process running in the background and eating close to 20MB of RAM. Give me virus protection when I want it. Don’t force it down my throat.

So I started trying to kill processes. I was able to kill all of them except for one. The security center would not let itself die. Not only that, after a few minutes it restarted the processes I had already killed. This sort of behavior is unacceptable. I bought McAfee to protect my computer from programs over which I have no control, yet it wants to behave like one of the programs I want it to protect me from. I looked through the product support forums and it seems a lot of people have been complaining about the resource consumption of the new update since its release a few days ago. There were too many posts to read them all. A quick search turned up nothing on exiting the security center. I have things to do and can’t be bothered by software that doesn’t do what I want it to. So, I decided to uninstall it. My fingers were crossed that I would be able to. Thankfully, it uninstalled completely, Security Center and all.

I’d really rather have good virus protection than to have none, but until they get this issue sorted there won’t be any McAfee products on this machine. If they re-enable the option to turn off the Security Center and get its resource consumption under control, then I’ll come back to it. Until then, I’ll continue to do what I’ve always done - avoid Internet Explorer like the plague (since that is essentially what it is), don’t use Microsoft Office (why pay so much money to have an infected computer?), and keep Windows patched up with the latest security fixes. I’m hesitant to try other antivirus software now, but it would be nice to find something that isn’t part of the problem.

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