McAfee and the Laptop

Late last year my laptop started acting funny and was really, really slow on booting up. I tried a lot of things to get it up to speed, including limiting the programs that started when booting, installing start up Cop, playing with the registry and other tips and hints to speed things up.

I finally decided that it was hopeless and backed up the important data and reloaded the operating system, Windows XP.

I had been using Norton Antivirus and Zone Alarm firewall. My ISP, Comcast offers McAfee antivirus, control Center and Firewall as part of their service. I thought, why not use it?

Big mistake. The download and install process was no problem because the Operating System was clean. However, McAfee refused to update the virus definitions, which is necessary with any antivirus program. Whenever I tried to update McAfee told me I had to download their download manager. That was fine the first time. However, everytime I tried to update the virus definitions McAfee wanted me to download the download manager, which was alread installed and in the system tray. There was no way to get around it. Frustrating to say the least.

Today I decided to uninstall McAfee and install AVG antivirus (free) and Zone Alarm Firewall (free). What a mess. I downloaded the .exe files for AVG and Zone Alarm and then went to uninstall McAfee. It required that I uninstall the firewall, then the Control Center, and then the antivirus. Or maybe it was the other way around. Too confusing. The damn thing never worked the way it should have and was very troubling to uninstall.

So, now Zone Alarm and AVG are doing their things on the laptop.

Live and learn.