Who knows bout McAfee Livesafe and Personal Security?

[Saracen999]

These both came pre-installed on my new laptop. Before I just 'nuke them from orbit', are they actually worth having? It doesn't look like it to me.

Note: I don't want/need 'secure' cloud storage, because I store NOTHING in the cloud.

Also, don't want a cloud password manager either. I use KeepassXC, and keep everything secure locally.

I'm not sure I understand all these packages offer, but it seems to be mainly that.



Finally, pre-installed 'free' stuff usually really grates with me, since it's nearly always either a bait 'n switch, or a 'trial', leading to a subscription, as I suspect these are.

Thoughts?

[Jonj1611]

Apparently reviews aren't too bad but I generally remove stuff like that and install the things that I know I want instead.

Also if you aren't going to use it then you have nothing to lose by removing it I guess

[Saracen999]

Yeah, that's my view. Just thought I'd check.

[spacein_vader]

Another vote for Kill it with fire from me.

[blueball]

Another vote for Kill it with fire from me.

Agreed. Can supply matches if required.

[cheesemp]

I removed it from both devices I had it came with. I have One drive (via Office 365) and Google drive so no need for something else for backup. The free windows AV seems to be fairly good nowadays anyway (when combined with Edge or other up to date browser).

[Macman]

Find that Windows Defender and common sense is the best you can get.

[Saracen999]

The other thing I immeiately removed was MS 365. In about 6 language versions. I don't even want this in English, and certainly not in French, German, Italian and oneor two more.

I wonder if companies (yes, Asus, I mean you, in this case) realise how just incredibly annoying users find it when they stuff useless junk on our new hardware. Both with respect to MS and McAfee, if I want it, I'll install it myself. All you achieve by stuffing it on is making me resent both it, and you.

Still, the Asus laptop didn't have anywhere near the level of junk pre-installed that my previous Surface Pro did.

[Apex]

Kill it and to be sure if you can do a clean install then i would.

[Saracen999]

I kinda did.

An annoying side-effect though. The ONLY thing I had actually installed was Firefox. After removing McAfee's stuff and those MS365 versions, Firefox was naff'd. The basic prog would run, but nothing got rendered in the display area.

Well, after a few hours of messing about, re-installing etc, it comes down to an issue with what I think was called VCRUNTIME140_1.DLL.

This appears to be a necessary library component from Visuall C++, which in turn is part of Visual Studio, and the uninstall program has left something messed up. At a guess, it's removed ab updates version of that file, leaving an old version in place, and maybe Firefox relies on said later version. Anyway, it seems to be some kind of messed up dependency, and I wasted about 6 hours trying to fix it (various tweaks suggested on various forums all not working) before giving in and doing a full Windows reset to factory default. This time, .... so far, so good. Firefox still working.

This is one reason why I detest companies stuffing unwanted junk on new machines. We either have to put up with it, waste disk space and/or risk resources getting used and the system slowed down with their garbage, or risk things like this happening de-junking brand new systems. Uninstalling stuff does not always go smoothly.

I remember doing a test about 25 years ago, with (IIRC) Symnatec's WinFax. It went like this :-

1) install clean Windows. Note how many registry entries there were.
2) install Winfax.
3) without doing anything with it, note how many registry entries there now are. About 1100 more than stage 1.
4) Uninstall Winfax. Note number of registry entries again.

By doing this, i.e. installing and immediately uninstalling, I gained approx 850 additional registry entries.

Yup, eight hundred and faffing fifty completely useless registry entries, for installing and uninstalling, without even starting the software up, even once. Granted, that was a long time ago, but it makes the point - even Uninstall often (nearly always) does not completely undo an install, and it certainly can change the installed versions of things like DLL files, which may cause (or solve) issues. What it doesn't do, almost ever, is return the system to the pristine state it would have been in had they not messed with it in the first place.

And that makes me very, very annoyed.

[Jonj1611]

My Asus laptop didn't come too badly loaded. I got rid of Mcafee. Their own liveupdater thing looks like it was made in 2002 however

[Saracen999]

There doesn't seem to be too much junk on this one. It has a couple of Asus tools, one of which seems to be a generic Asus update thingy (MyAsus, or something like that) and, of course, ArmouryCrate. I haven't really given much attention to either yet, and both might need updates, though the manufacture dateon the machine is only about 2 months ago. They were out of stocks for quite a while so I'd guess they were made, shipped andsold all pretty quickly, so built-in tools might be pretty recent.

I'd also guess the 'out of stock' thing is a side-effect of the current GPU shortage, meaning laptops with a half-decent GPU probably sell faster than they otherwise would. I needed a laptop (as well), but doubt I'd have goine for one of this spec' but for the difficulty of getting almost any medium/high end desktop GPU. Or almost any at all, for that matter, though it seems to have eased just a little, recently.

[I_Am_Sy]

I used to sell this crap, £80 a year, and I'd have you walking out with atleast 3 years worth, plus all the other junk my old company would want to sell you, a £350 laptop would set you back by over a grand once I was done selling, and for that you'd be worse of then just buying the £350 laptop.

McAfee is a scam, Livesafe is not the product, you are the product if you use it.

Nuke from space, and feel better with Microsoft Defender not nagging you every 3 seconds.

[Output]

I can only assume they get paid a fee for adding the junk (unless it's their own software of course, in which case they'd probably argue that it's helpful), which while it makes sense from a business financial perspective, is obviously less pleasant for the users.

As long as there's not something that causes too much of a backlash though, such as Lenovo's Superfish incident, manufacturers will likely still continue doing it and probably argue that people can uninstall the junk if they don't want it.

[I_Am_Sy]

Well I was selling McAfee at £80 a year, and the retail store would make almost 100% of that as profit, so you can understand why they wanted It sold so badly, when it comes to McAfee themselves they don't really make any money at point of sale, what they do is profit hugely from the renewal costs and the data mining, hence they then make it so difficult to get rid of their software and try to manipulate people into paying for it again.

As for the poor guy in the store selling it to you, in most cases there is no commission, they are not selling it to line their own pockets, instead they are targeted heavily to sell it, and basically it's a case of rip customer off and get your minimum wage, or find yourself unemployed.

Anytime you buy a new laptop buy it online, don't deal with their crap, and once you've got it do a clean install basically.

[janglos199]

McAfee prevented me from downloading questionable software, but it did not do anything for me when I've caught some virus already. When I did, nothing could help me. I tried Avast, Kaspersky, Nod32, DrWeb and some others. The only thing that helped me was reinstalling my operating system and formatting my drives.