McAfee Woes: The Antivirus That Feels Like a Virus

The progenitor of modern viruses is probably a rather harmless little curio called the Brain, or the Pakistani brain, which nestled in the boot sector of floppy drives and displayed a tongue-in-cheek message.

Welcome to the Dungeon (c) 1986 Amjads (pvt) Ltd VIRUS_SHOE RECORD V9.0 Dedicated to the dynamic memories of millions of viruses who are no longer with us today - Thanks GOODNESS!!! BEWARE OF THE er..VIRUS : this program is catching program follows after these ....$#@%$@!!

It was ultimately harmless and was enough to secure its author, Amjad Alvi, a place in any computer history textbook.

It was 1986, and a young programmer took particular interest in this new kind of program. In an interview with TRT World via Skype, John McAfee said:

“Nobody had ever thought about using software to act like bacteria and viruses. That’s a genius idea,”

He then dedicated himself to solving what he saw as a potential problem. The company that this firebrand programmer would go on to build still bears his name and has become a multimillion-pound juggernaut, but he never used the software himself.  In fact, McAfee eschewed the use of any virus detection software of all kinds, preferring prevention rather than cure.

Although John McAfee is no longer with us, dead by an apparent suicide in 2021, his company lives on, despite changing names, ownership and business practices many times.

McAfee is now a byword among my fellow tech nerds for awful virus protection. So why is it hated so much? Why would most techies prefer to use Windows Defender? Will it make your hard drive dry heave when you install it?

McAfee’s Performance Issues.

McAfee is well known in the tech industry for being resource-intensive, or to put it less diplomatically and more basically, a bad program makes the computer run poorly. All programs have a cost regarding their resources, such as RAM and CPU cycles. If your computer puts 25% of its operating power into running a program in the background, it will not have those resources to spend on other programs. If you’re checking your emails, this isn't a problem, but if you are running a CPU-intensive program like a full graphics game or an audio/video editing suite, you can find a pretty steep performance drop-off.

So many users on sites like Reddit have complained about McAfee's resource-intensive nature. In addition to eating up your precious CPU runtime, it is also bloatware, meaning that the McAfee suite comes bundled with many features that you might not want or that would even be detrimental to your user experience.

All these tools run, eat up your PC's performance, and thus your system actually runs worse, meaning that you need to shell out more money to get back the performance that you lost. The scans are slow with McAfee. Some would say that it’s in the service of being thorough; however, other anti-virus products that do the same thing faster and more thoroughly are available. 

Aggressive Marketing.

It’s one thing to receive a couple of emails a month, even one a week, reminding you that you need to update your virus definitions. It’s quite another to have your system grind to a halt when a pop-up that you have no way of blocking invades your session.

This can be a huge problem for gamers or those using their PC as a multimedia device. Things are going well, and your computer is running surprisingly well for once. Then, out of the blue, your game minimizes (but does not pause), and you find an unskippable advert for a product that you don’t want or need. Thus, McAfee’s aggressive advertising has spoiled your fun.

As a rule, it’s never a good idea when your adverts make your prospective clientele curse your name and seek the services of a tech professional to expunge all trace of all of your products from their system. This is the opposite of what an advert should do.

Removing McAfee, which comes preinstalled on many devices, can be onerous, to say the least. You don’t have to spend too long on the internet to find horror stories about the lengths that techs have had to go to get rid of the program.

At this stage, McAfee is on more systems than the mouse pointer, and the nagging popups that ensue are a constant bugbear for those who decided to go down another path.

As well as acting like an actual virus rather than a program for their removal, McAfee also employs subscription traps. For example, you sign up for a three-month free trial period, and they then bill you automatically before the end of the trial for a full year. It’s also purposefully difficult to unsubscribe from the service, which goes up in price yearly, without giving you the option to opt out. 

Questionable Effectiveness

Threat detection in general and false positives in particular are a cause for concern, unlike with some of the major competitors, like Bitdefender, Kaspersky, or even just using Windows Defender alone, which offer better detection rates.

Often, perfectly innocent programs and websites will be flagged up by the software, making them unusable, while real threats go under the radar and infect your system. This leads to the situation where your system is infected with malware, but you wouldn’t be able to do anything anyway, as the program won’t let you run the program that you wanted to in the first place.

At the time of writing, McAfee does not offer a proactive defence against Ransomware, which is problematic as this is one of the major areas of threat detection and prevention that you will want to invest heavily in. Ransomware is thought to cost users millions of pounds per annum globally, so clearly, if you are paying a not insubstantial amount per year for protection against all threats, then you should receive it.

Better Alternatives to McAfee.

There are many antivirus products on the market, and (as with most things tech) the answer as to ‘Which one is best?’ is ‘It depends’.

• If you’re a Windows user, you can’t go wrong with simply enabling Windows Defender; It’s free and built into Windows. It is a lightweight and efficient system with no annoying pop-ups and excellent detection rates. However, there will be the occasional false positive; you or your tech guy can comb through and separate out the very occasional false alarm.

• Bitdefender offers top-tier detection with minimal system impact. Despite some privacy concerns,

• Kaspersky offers some very good security features, and ESET is a lightweight and highly effective solution as well.

Conclusion

In short McAfee is a bloated, inefficient, outdated program that produces more pop-ups and false positives than actual threats detected, it would be my advice to uninstall it today as it’s a resource hog that offers no more protection than Windows Defender and there are much stronger products on, what is now, a very crowded marketplace.

These days, we don’t need snake oil—we need smart, streamlined solutions. So if your antivirus feels more like a virus, it’s time to uninstall McAfee and reclaim your PC. Need help uninstalling McAfee? Get in touch — I’ve exorcised more of it than I care to count