And McAfee also keeps tigers away! C’mon, do you see any tigers around your computer? Case closed.
I don’t see any point in waiting for the sub to expire. You are better off removing it now. (And making sure McAfee doesn’t automatically renew you later.) I know people have a hard time with accepting their money is gone but it is. Just dump it and move on.
What operating systems are these running?
They’re both android.
OK! I uninstalled McAfee and activated Windows Defender. McAfee wasn’t even running on startup, so I’m not sure a) what it was doing to “protect” me and b) how it was slowing down my computer (my much more digitally competent son says my computer boots up really slowly). I unenrolled from their autorenewal “service” so they shouldn’t bug me any more – the credit card number they have is long gone, anyway.
I restarted and there is no discernable change on startup or browsing performance.
I did get a notice from Microsoft that my computer is SO OLD (thanks, guys) that they can’t/won’t install the next version of Windows on it, due out in 10/2025. So maybe my poor little laptop is just as old and creaky and slow as I am. I guess I’ll have to dump it (if I’m still alive by then!)
It was mostly protecting you from having too much money.
You’ll get plenty of email reminders about renewing it.
Most of them won’t be from McAfee, of course (my MIL was convinced that her bank account was compromised when she got those scam emails).
You also need to be careful when installing apps like Adobe. Frequently they’ll install McAfee automatically unless you uncheck a box. McAfee is like a cancer in your computer, best to not let it sneak in.
So what are the other possibilities, anyone? Have you opened up Task Manager when you are seeing this sluggishness to see what is using a lot CPU, memory, disk?
As I said above my sluggishness problems vanished when I got a new computer with enough memory. Plenty of memory five years ago is starving for memory today.
(Now I’ll start complaining about how no one writes efficient code anymore, unless they do embedded stuff.)
I’m afraid this is it. The laptop is 10 years old, and even though the only big thing on the startup menu is Chrome, it just takes a while.
And a big AMEN to your comment about tight coding. Too many unneeded, unwanted frills .
Chrome is a horrible memory hog, even worse than Firefox. (I monitored memory usage all the time on my old computer.) Plus there are tons of Windows processes running.