Thread: McAfee keeps reinstalling itself

My work laptop has a copy of McAfee Security Center installed, apparently provided by Comcast. I've never been a fan of the program. It constantly updates itself at the most inconvenient of times and when my computer had Vista it had an ULTRA annoying habit of forgetting all my program permissions and requesting it every time a major update was installed. Now with Windows 7 it does this new annoying thing of disabling itself while it downloads a whole new version of itself in the background. Keep in mind, this isn't a standard definition update, but basically the entire program like you were installing from scratch. During this time the resident shields are disabled, which to me sounds like leaving your front door wide open while you run out and buy a deadbolt. Then it goes and re-installs itself and starts running normally again, but this has happened at least 3 times and quite frankly I'm tired of it.

Has anyone else experienced this behavior? I'm really about ready to ditch the Mcafee and remove it from my machine and install AVG instead, but I'd prefer to not have to go to that level.

Originally Posted by yourbeliefs

Has anyone else experienced this behavior? I'm really about ready to ditch the Mcafee and remove it from my machine and install AVG instead, but I'd prefer to not have to go to that level.

That's not normal behavior. I have McAfee Antivirus Plus, which includes the security center, and it is very unobtrusive on Windows 7. That free version you got might be an older version. On an older laptop, with XP and an older version of McAfee, it's slightly more intrusive (I can see the spinning arrow in the tray when it updates), but it's still nowhere as bad as what you're seeing.

You should be able to control when it performs updates if you don't like it performing them automatically.