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Oh, my dear, dear McAfee Viruscan 4.35, how I miss you.

Oh, Windows Service Pack 2, how I loathe you with all the power of my fragile and tender heart.

After the recent (for me) upgrade to SP2, I discovered that my old, faithful installation of McAfee antivirus program did not work and crashed on the loading of Windows. Fear not, I said to myself, download the latest McAfee VirusScan demo and see if it works out for you! Thus, I downloaded McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8.0i. Little did I know.

What does everyone do after a fresh antivirus installation? Update. During this process, I encountered more problems I’ve ever encountered with a program in my life.

The array of problems I encountered : (you know I love lists)

• When I clicked on “Update” option, a window came up, said that it was “connecting to server”. After a while (a long while), I got bored of limited connectivity and googled for “mcafee update problems“. It seems that to update new versions of McAfee, you have a) to subscribe/register to their site (outrageous, but passable) b) to use a complete web interface that is using pop-up windows (!) – the universal web surfer menace – to download and install engine upgrades and new virus definitions.
• Needless to say, their update web page does not work under Firefox 1.5 that I have installed. And if it does, Firefox automatically blocks pop-up windows. And knowing that, McAfee warns the users to “temporarily stop” the blocking to be able to download the updates. What were they thinking?
• After copying and pasting the (rather long) URL in Explorer (yuck), the update window found and downloaded 1 update to one of the suite’s programs, and 1 alone. There were others for the other programs, but you’re not warned, you have to check again after the upgrade. It randomly chooses what update to present to you? Maybe.
• After applying engine upgrades, the system warns that it must restart for the changes to have effect. Excuse me? When exactly did we return to 90’s? RESTART? Who restarts these days? During the last two days I’ve restarted my computer over 5 times for McAfee to be able to apply the oh-so-important engine upgrades.
• Along with the Security Suite, a nifty thing called “Privacy Service” or something like that is installed. That nifty thing starts happily along with Windows and requires a successful login to allow you to use the Net on your PC. The first time that I didn’t bother logging in, it prevented any net-related program from launching, Firefox included. Needless to say, it was the first thing I uninstalled from the suite.
• And we arrive at the mighty firewall…After I got tired of ZoneAlarm suspicious initiatives (others love it, I’m quite sceptical about it) I decided to give a try to McAfee built-in firewall. This loyal little thingy thought that it would be fun to warn me for possible intrusions by using an ugly pop-up window and a really (really) high-pitched bomb-dropping sound. The first time I heard it, I almost spilt my coffee, it’s ridiculously irritating. This thing went on and on, without me finding a secure way to prevent it.
• Did I mention the VirusScan? Oh, my precious. I was downloading something illegal at the time (sue me) using torrents, which contained a file named keygen.exe. So what did my nifty and loyal On-Demand Scanner did? It erased it at once, of course, warning me only after the removal of the particular file. So I had to download it again, shutting out the on-demand scanner just in case it wanted to play hard again.

No, I won’t uninstall it. I’ll keep it until the demo version (and my nerves) expire. Just to see where all this is going.

Don’t you think that commercial antivirus programs became increasingly irritating and suspiciously independent all of a sudden? That’s why I prefer AVG antivirus at work, it’s free, it’s lightweight, it’s updated almost daily and so easy to update and maintain! I suggest you give it a try, people, if you want to avoid commercial programs.

mcafee, antivirus, firewall, spyware