McAfee offered with the Alienware M17x

Unfortunately I didn't have the option not to spec McAfee with my Alienware M17x order in my location.

In the New Zealand and Australia region, we are forced to take a "McAfee(R) Security Center - 15 Months Version" in with our total pricing, and cannot be downgraded.

Since I am going to get a 15 month version anyway, I kind of want to get my money's worth out of it.

The last time (many years ago) I had this software, it was a big piece of crap. Has anything changed?
Is it resource hungry, can anything now be said good about it, can you persuade me?

Can anyone recommend keeping on my brand new M17x when it arrives, or should I just ditch it and find a better product.

 

In all my experiences, McAfee is still (has been and always will be) a giant steaming pile of crap that needs to be excised the moment it appears, anywhere and on anything..

So no, nothing good.

Microsoft Security Essentials is actually pretty darned good...others will recommend other things.

 

mcafee is the most ram intensive, CPU robbing, least controllable, anti-virus program on the market. delete it ASAP.

 

:laugh: @ comments

Yeah the free MS AV is not bad at all, seem to protect their best interests, due to it being their own baby.

Im starting to feel bad about 15 months of wasted product. I think the package might include a media kit (?) with McAfee, may be I can sell it to some kind of loyalist.

Any good comments to say. (hopefully???)

 

Good luck finding any of those For McAfee at least.

The specs on your R3 in the sig look nice? hehe

 

I had McCrapee on two machines from Dell, one I was given three years, it was more of prison sentence then a bonus. Its terrible IMO. Between annoying updates, frequent slow downs, blocking ports I had said not to block, it just stunk.

I prefer Eset. It's small in size, resource light, and not a constant nag and
drag.

I say uninstall and get something you like. Being " included " on your machine and technically paying for it shouldn't make you feel obligated to keep it.

 

My mom had McAfee in her laptop and desktop on the office. And still, she gets those adwares and trojans, While I use the avast free version for over 2years now, and no adwares or any other trojan has got into the system. McAfee is not so good.

 

Thanks for your comments.

I can't imaging keeping it. I tried to talk myself into it, but yeah like you people say, just verifies what I had feared.

Yeah I think Dell spec my factory (apart from the video card) optioned M17x with 16GB RAM to cope with McAfee trying to take a dump.

 

One thing I loved about ordering and then receiving my R2 was finding out there was absolutely no bloatware of any kind on it. It had Windows, drivers, and the necessary AW programs (OSD, CC).

My fiance's computer, OTOH...I had to spend hours removing, re-removing, etc all the bloatware Dell installed on that machine (eventually just redoing Windows entirely, even though when she ordered it I made sure to call in and request no bloatware, I even gave them a list of programs not to install). Of course, OEMs make a lot of money by putting these programs on your PC so they did it anyways >.> McAfee and god forbid Norton are the two things I utterly abhor in all ways because they're worse than most malware/viruses to begin with. Norton even acts like a virus by reinstalling itself until you download and run the removal tool (which you have to know about, it's not like it tells the average user this).

Could be worse I suppose, many Android phones come with bloatware you can't take off unless you root the phone (some phones are much more difficult than others) and/or they can cause real problems when you try to remove them without installing another ROM.

 

Crapafee and Norton are both kill on site apps in my mind. I use Avast at the house and have done so for the past 6yrs with no issues.

 

So Norton sux too? I get it free as a comcast customer but id be willing to drop it if its that bad. Do the free AV/AM have real time protection like norton?it seems alright so far, had some bad experiences with mcafee in the past too.

 

lol my father in law gave me his laptop to install software last weekend.

While I had it, I ran a virus scan on the system, and it was clean anyway.

He takes it home and then 1 hour later calls me on the phone, "My desktop back ground has changed, and I can't get on the internet anymore". I asked him "did you click on anything unusual", he said "no" and then went on about something about being the 1 millionth visitor to a website.

btw. He wasn't using McAfee, just MS free AV, but anyway go figure, I think it depends on the user a lot to what they get infected with.

 

Yes. It does have real time protection. I'm sure the avast free version can do better than those expensive crappy mcafee and norton.

 

True! Remember, The best anti-virus is also yourself. If you are not so sure about the application, Then don't install it.

 

Bingo. Most of the work I do for my family involves bloat ware or extortion ware that they clicked on and it jacked up their system. In either case I remove Crapafee or Norton and then install Avast before they get it back.

Nod32 is good, small footprint in RAM if you want a pay version as well.

 

Most malware always exploits social engineering rather than technical. It's a lot easier to get someone to install something (obviously or not) than it is to actually get a working exploit going that doesn't get closed.

Humans are the easiest thing to exploit because most of them are willfully ignorant and uneducated and like it that way.

 

I personally wouldnt touch Mcrapfee with a barge pole. Theres a guy who tests out a/v and posts you tube vids .... i watched him test out mcafee with various known links and, well, lets just say his system got totally FUBAR'd....it didnt recognise alot of stuff - in the end, his computer was a great big steaming pile of crap after mcafee had done its best to protect it.

Heres his review on one particular mcafee product in two parts: (its a great endorsement on the quality of Mcafee stuff lol)

http://www.youtube.com/user/languy99#p/search/0/NFMZdrCN3G4

http://www.youtube.com/user/languy99#p/search/6/LCFNd2jLNnM

He also reviews lots of others too you may wanna chek out.

(I personally use ESET Smart Security 4 a/v suite - no issues at all - ESET NOD32 is also good)

 

Concur with the majority here...even if I had to buy McAfee (or Norton), I would remove it immediately upon receiving my laptop. I have used both in the past (paid versions), and had nothing but trouble running my own programs, let alone the fact they don't protect very well.

Since I have been using Malwarebytes and Bitdefender Internet Suite, I have had ZERO issues in running programs, being infected, or updating/scanning (paid versions). Until I find something better, I will be using these two programs exclusively and gladly rebuy whenever my subscription(s) run out.

 

I'm with Drek_Alots; get rid of McAfee. I use Panda and am totally happy and have never, ever had a virus problem. And let me not get into all the junk I like to surf with wild abandon! But here's a slightly different take:

Java, now an Oracle product (used to be Sun, but they were bought) is now offering a free install of McAfee essentially every time you install or update the software. Be careful, or you might not un-check the box and then adware versions of that nefarious tapeworm-infested dung-pile foisted on your system. What does this tell me? Well, it seems that many companies have struck some kind of devil's bargain with the henchmen of McAfee in a dark smoky room somewhere, and Dell and Oracle are unfortunately on the list. If that is how McAfee wants to do business, they are allowed, but I say vote the big NO and don't let their garbage anywhere near your machine. A good company, like Panda, Eset, etc. will do it right and sell you a proper product that works right and honors your intelligence as a user and respects your machine. I refuse to do business with companies that treat me like McAfee wants to, especially when anti-virus tests in PC World and other places have consistently found McAfee to be trailing pretty far behind.

 

I got 12months free McAfee when I got my R1, wasn't optional. Literally the first thing I did when using my laptop for the first time was to uninstall it and then install NOD32. It's such a piece of crap.

Remember a while back a McAfee update caused it to delete some svchost processes, breaking computers? Says it all really.

 

Haha - I honestly couldnt agree more whole-heartedly.

 

McAfee totally blows, and that seems to be unanimous--at least on this thread. In my opinion, any AV software that does not allow a user to set scan exceptions at a file and folder level is absolutely useless garbage, and that's just one of many things wrong with Crapafee. That's what came on my AW M17x R2 and I removed it within a few days. I've never used a more resource hogging and ineffective AV program. And, I have fixed many virus-infested systems running fully updated Crapafee software.

MS Security Essentials has worked great on all systems in my home except for this one. It causes unrecoverable hard freezes for some reason. I farted around with it about a month after nixing the Crapafee and finally gave up and installed Avira. I have since heard from several other people that MSE was causing the same hard freezes on their systems... not sure why it works excellent on some systems and like garbage on others. That's too strange and it was a huge disappointment because I liked it so well on my other computer systems. (I still use MSE on 3 of our 6 computers.)

I also ran NOD32 for a couple of years and really liked it. I finally decided I was tired of paying for the subscription and went back to using the free products. I've never had any problems with Avast or Avira, and free is a great price. I recommend choosing either of them, or MSE if it plays nice with your computer, if free is what fits your budget the best.

I was a Norton fan for many years and about 6 or 8 years ago they started making major bloatware that hogged system resources something fierce. I would have heartily agreed with Drek_Alots and JaiaV not more than 10 days ago about Norton being junk like Crapafee. I had read a few reviews that indicated Norton fixed their bloatware issues. So I decided to give it a shot and installed the trial version.

I ran the trial version of NAV 2011 a few days and had to admit it seemed to work with as little resource overhead as Avira and Avast have. I was extremely skeptical at first, but I ended up being very pleased. It has a very small footprint and I sort of like the feature that tells you that a file download was scanned and found to be clean.

I decided to take the plunge about a week ago after finding it for only $11 (1 year of updates, download version) at DirectDeals. This is not a "suite" of unnecessary security crap, just the NAV with Anti-malware. For me, it was worth the measly $11 to pay for something made in America versus getting something for free from another country.

 

Well, Crapafee was acquired by Intel on August 19, 2010. Still, we all would expect Crapafee to be at least more Intelligent in removing virus while minimizing resources used. Apparently, Crapafee still has not learnt much since then.

I still just do not understand why as a complete security suite, can't Crapafee centralize antivirus, firewall, anti-spam and anti-malware in one or two executables? Each component of the suite is given its own executable, thus most of tasks shown in Windows task Manager belong to Crapafee. Gosh, it is not definitely an elegant implementation.

 

I use Macafee since i got it for three years free. To be honest, it does use a lot of resources, but I really have no complaints. Haven't had an issue in over a year. I figure if Im going to have plenty of resources, I may as well use them. 99% of security is in the user. On my other systems i run MSE with no issues. I haven't seen any slow downs in my system due to Macafee. Nothing that's affected my work. Obviously i have no security software at all on my benchmarking drive and never had any issues on that either. For the longest time i never used security software and still had no issues. Again all in the user.

 

DR650SE

I see your point that our Alienware laptops have plenty of resources and not even resource-hog Crapafee can slow our system down. Still, in my opinion, I would rather dedicate the resources to gaming, rather than to a program that does not fulfil its purpose well.

 

IN US and UK at the very least, buyers can opt out of having Crapafee installed by default in their Alienware laptops, without any penalty. This opt-out scheme should be extended to any country.

Since I cannot opt-out of this Crapafee scheme, my recovery partition and AlienRespawn Recovery Media contains Crapafee. Each time if I do restore my computer using AlienRespawn, Crapafee is installed and I have to disinfect my laptop by uninstalling Crapafee.

Well, I personally do not use AlienRespawn, instead rely on clean install to restore my computer to working state. This should serve as a reminder for those who are not in opt-out scheme and want to rely on AlienRespawn.

 

Use Microsoft Security Essentials or Kaspersky, nothing else.

 

It doesn't cause brain tumors. Probably.

Seriously, if you haven't paid for it, you are losing nothing by uninstalling it. I'm with the majority on this one.

 

What's your opinion on avg, I used to use it back in the day but they are out in the market now.... I remember when it was FREEEEEEE, I threw that on my old qosmio and gave it to my wife since ask she does is facebook.. But the performance dropped dramatically.

 

Though this is a personal preference topic.. I like kaspersky, as for essentials never tried it..

 

I use NAV on all 7 systems I have, not one issue, I have two teenagers too. Norton has come a long way, and it's free if you have Comcast. McAfee still needs alot of work, I would not use it, I would even use MSE over it.

 

i agree with you flynnaz..... i have been using NIS 2009-2011 now on both my HP DV5 (awaiting AW m17xr3) and my wife's ACER AOD150 (first gen ATOM N270) and it just works.....sure the ATOM might struggle a wee bit when there is a full blown scan going on and there is flash running, but on the whole watching a ripped video/ with scan...no issues at all (upgraded the AOM to 2GB SC)