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Friday, April 1, 2011

Getting rid of McAfee antivirus products on a Win XP PC

McAfee antivirus products are widely installed on PCs. I'm sure they work fine but they have a reputation of being intrusive when you let your subscription lapse. The company is not alone in this. With a number of products you will get intrusive popups and warnings if you let your subscription lapse.

What you should be able to do is go to 'Add/Remove Programs' in your Control Panel and uninstall the software - just like most other professional software allows you to do.

For some reason, at least in their older products, McAfee has chosen to make this difficult. In order to remove most (not all) traces of McAfee from your system you should get the MPCR.exe program from McAfee and run it.

http://download.mcafee.com/products/licensed/cust_support_patches/MCPR.exe

Download this onto your PC and run it - it will take a while and it will popup black 'command prompt' windows while it runs, each with cryptic text indicating the individual scripts that are being executed. Just let it do it's thing.

Restart you machine when it is done.

When you are trying to fix an infected PC, these remnants of old antivirus software clutter up your PC's registry and other directories.

Hope this helps

 

3 comments:

Edward Pitt said...
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Edward Pitt said...
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Edward Pitt said...
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