I bought my PC off a friend a few years ago. He had a McAfee Viruscan subscription (is that the right word?) that would presumably update itself to protect the computer from newly-created bug bytes. I never renewed the subscription once it expired (not smart, I know), but the program still resides in my system and turns on at every start-up. It’s active even as I type this, its little icon glowing in my system tray.
Is it worthless at this point? Should I just uninstall it to free up hardrive space? I mean, is this like arming my palace guards with water balloons and Silly String?
Now, I know many of you will think less of me for allowing this foolhardy situation to exist on my computer in the first place. I will not disagree, but thusfar I have been lucky never to have picked up any viruses, worms, etc. – a situation I chalk up to the fact that I live an extremely bland internet life, seldom straying beyond the same half-dozen websites day after day (you can keep all your porn, mp3s, video clips, etc.). Still, I’d be happy to hear any suggestions for upping my virus protection beyond its present (probably useless) state. Trouble is, I don’t want to spend any $$, and certainly not a month-to-month or year-to-year fee. I know there’s free virus protection out there. What should I use?
It might also be worth your while going over to symantec and making use of the free online scan? Follow the prompts and let it weave its magic:
scroll down to “check for security risks” on the righthand side.
It’s not a bad idea to run a couple of virus protection programs on your computer simultaneously. Likewise, ensure you have spyware/adware taken care of too - use something like Adaware which also offers a free version.
'Nother vote for AVG…works like a charm, stays resident, runs a full scan every morning at 2AM and updates itself weekly. And the price is right.
Good luck getting that McAfee dreck off the machine. It doesn’t have an uninstall fuction and it took me a week to get rid of it.
P.S. You need to also run AdAware or a comparable garbageware killer and a Registry cleaner at least once week. 'Specially if you use Win XP and IE/Outlook. If you run XP, run, do not walk, to the nearest Netscape download site. (The popup and spam killers alone will save you enuf time to run for President).
I suppose so. Sometimes I disable AVG to improve performance when running a game, and restart it with the desktop icon, but if you don’t do that (or simply want to use the menu in the START menu) I don’t see a problem removing the desktop icon. And I guess you could always make a new one from the START menu, if you wanted it back.