Divorcing Your Long Time Software of Choice

Goodbye, my old friend! I cannot remember when I did not have McAfee products on my computers, but the long time love affair is over. I know it has been longer than 15 years because that is when I realized I was on a business track instead of a personal track with my technology and wanted all of my software to be squeaky clean, registered and safe. This was not only to protect myself but to keep from the embarrassing situation of inadvertently passing on some sort of virus, worm, or other kind of digital slimy-nasty thing on to a client.

As a crossover from engineering into the human resources realm, I have always approached my work with a left-brained mentality and with the exception of some frustrated calls to tech support when something went wrong I’ve been pretty independent. I’m not keeping score, but about 50% of those infrequent calls were probably because of something stupid I had done in trying to reverse engineer a product or create my own work-around. I have done programming in a previous life, but I am not a programmer. Computers hardware has never been daunting and I am very comfortable going into the guts of a box where no man has gone before…as evidenced by the dust there…but I am not a computer engineer. I have always been the technical go-to with friends, family and colleagues, but I am far from being the techy genius they think I am. So I am not someone to give expert advice on software selection, but I am most definitely a super-user consumer who gets pissed off when the voice on the tech services line treats me like I am an idiot. So this is a good place to begin the story of the de-evolution of my affair with McAfee.

The first stage of any break-up is with the little things that become annoying. My first inkling that we were not compatible came with a call to tech support several years ago. I’m not sure where you are calling when you finally get through to a real human being at McAfee, but the first level responders are so heavily accented that they are difficult to understand over the phone. I recognize that the ability to speak fluent English is not an indication of intelligence because I know several very articulate English speaking people who are as dumb as a bag of rocks. However, as a recruiter and manager, I would have chosen somebody else to answer that call…especially to someone who is already having problems. “May I call you tHomas?” (pronouncing the H in my first name) to which I sarcastically replied, “Thit, you can call me jutht about anything if you can fix my thoftware.” Yes, I know…a little over the top, but the frustration of first level support being so hard to reach in the first place, and software that wasn’t behaving…well you might say the situation affected my behavior. Problem solved – we kissed and made up – and we had several more years of a tenuous but productive work together.

Another contributing factor leading to a falling-out is constantly stumbling over people or things that you should be able to take for granted. Have you ever been in the middle of a dash to a deadline and suddenly your computer slows to a crawl? The telltale swirling of an icon somewhere is supposed to alert you to the fact that something is happening in the background, but when the “background” invades the “foreground” something is not working as it should. For virus protection, I assumed that this was something that had to be endured to protect me from the bad guys. When I realized that I was wishing for someone to protect me from McAfee’s protection, I knew that I was becoming more dissatisfied. The fact that I could not seem to ever get their spam protection to recognize even spam I had reported to them could be ignored, but it was always in the back of my mind as something waiting to blow up. I won’t even bring up the part about having to disconnect one of the key security features that was blocking web sites I needed for business. That little trick had me calling other people’s tech support only to find out that McAfee was the culprit. Hey, Mac…not nice to make me look so stupid!

Reluctantly renewing an annual contract for multiple computers several times while being borderline discontented was the result of laziness on my part and of lack of knowledge about how much McAfee’s competition had improved. Basically, the theory of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” becomes rationalization for “Well, I’ve always done it that way.” Then one day several months ago my life changed. It no longer “ain’t broke” and somehow a Trojan crept into one of my computers. I’m not the kind of person who clicks on every link I get even from trusted friends. I have totally immersed myself in social media and know about the pitfalls of being exposed, but I do not do dumb things online. As a matter of fact, I was not even working over the Memorial Day weekend when the attack happened and the computer was off the whole time. Could accessing my email remotely from someone else’s computer cause this? Could I trigger something by using social media apps on a smart phone? When I turned the computer on when I returned on Tuesday there was evidence that the bad guys had hooked onto my email and were sending emails in my name to everyone on the planet…well, at least everyone in my address book. I asked my old friend McAfee to find the problem, but he couldn’t find anything.

Researching furiously on how to dig deeper and after changing all my passwords, I downloaded a Kapersky virus removal tool to retrace McAfee’s steps and voilà… it found things that should have not even had a chance to survive the clinical environment I thought I was maintaining. Doing a little more online research, which I probably should have done years ago, I learned that according to some experts McAfee was one of the lowest rated security programs for detecting viruses in the wild. Experts disagree, but I had evidence that at least the temporary Kapersky fix was better.

Too late to say that I will make a long story short, but I recently replaced McAfee with ESET Smart Security 5 based on extensive research and some advice from friends. So far so good and I can report that after several weeks I am happy with my new partner. I will mention that I only bought a one-year subscription, so they will get a big time scrutiny before renewal next year.

Saying goodbye to McAfee was not painful for me at this point because the marriage was really over a long time ago. But he did not take it so well. His first response to being removed was an arrogant splash screen saying laughingly something to the effect of “Hey Stupid! You still have an active subscription!” I ignored him. The time for talking about this had past! As I stuck the knife in a little deeper, a flash of a red pop-up box appeared briefly as if he appeared to want to say something else, but wanted to think about it a little more. Then the blood-red dialog box returned chiding me that “You Still Have a Subscription” and some other words I didn’t bother to read. No, I had cancelled the renewal already and the die was cast. After bleeding out for a while longer, a small, last gasp bubble informed me “Your computer may not be secure.” No shit, Sherlock. That’s why we are having this experience.