McAfee offers cash for clunkers

Dazed and Confused

"McAfee also promised a two-year extension to subscribers whose PCs were knackered by the update"

What - we caused you pain, here, have 2 years of additional pain free of charge ?

I'm using Microsoft's free offering, it is lean, works fine, is free...

Oh Yeah!

As usual, the reimbursement is for money paid to others to get your computer repaired. What if your "expense" was your time only? And a lot of it most likely. Once again, a corporation refuses to recognize an individual's time as having any worth. "Here you go boy, here's $12.94 for the ten solid hours you spent rebuilding everything. Oh you had plans with your family ... well, they'll understand now won't they."

People who continue to use the POS program get exactly what they deserve.

Home users only!??

Nice try. For the most part, home users were unaffected by this McAfee SNAFU. This 'announcement' looks more like smoke & mirrors than anything substantial.

I have no doubts the product EULA for home users & corporate users is very similar (if not identical) in it verbiage about limits of responsibility for McAfee (ie: if the product breaks your computer, we are not responsible).

Legal question.... If by making this offer on to home consumer users, does McAfee effectively negate this legal clause in corporate users EULA?

And if so, who is going to be the first to take them to court? There has got to be a legal firm which will take this on pro bono.

Deja vu

The irony is that McAfee made exactly the same blunder (FP'ing on a Windows DLL) in the early 2000s; as a result they set up... a QA Dept for DAT releases, including extensive false positive tests.

Risk Benefit Analysis Needed

Are the risks of getting a computer virus really worse than the risks of running McAfee software?

Can somebody clever do the maths?

Hmm

After the third C this morning to be missing SVCHOST.EXE this morning I was starting to smell a rat. Thank you for joining the dots El-reg, I'll be ointing all my customers back to McAffe, installing something else and double charging on the understanding they'll get it back.

Offers CASH ?

Please, Mr. McAfee-

Just send AVG/Avira/NOD32 discs out in the mail instead, at least show some respect to the final skull&%@# of your customers. We know you're not good for the cash anyway.

Last time we could rely on your shit, it came on a 5.25" floppy. Good job on the Michaelangelo battle, and total downhill after that. Turds.

Nothing to see here, we're done.

AVG no better these days

I too would have recommended AVG in the past... in fact I have installed the free edition on dozens on systems for friends and family.

But the latest incarnation is nothing more than bloatware too... I upgraded from 8 to 9 and it was uninstalled within 48hrs. in excess of 12 background processes running constantly, not to mention the fact it disables parts of windows and supplants itself in it's place without permission.

So I no longer recommend AVG to anyone at all, but I do recommend Microsoft security essentials... and I can't believe I'm promoting an MS product... but as far as free AV software goes, this is tough to beat. I am now upgrading everyone I can as 99% of them are getting sick and tired of the nearly full screen ADs from AVG trying to get them to pay for an upgrade... another reason to ditch it.

Happens far to often with McAfee

In all the years its been an AV they have always peppered their updates with random faux pas.

I recomend Avira over AVG

Avira is very light weight, you can get a 3 pack for a very reasonable price, it integrates with Security Centre, it has it's own firewall and works on 7 with OPSWAT support.

Avast

It works. It's free. It doesn't screw up your system.

Not much more I can say, really.

Don't they do any testing?

I dunno - it's just a mad idea but let me float it past you and see what you think.... I've been in the software development biz for nearly 30 years and from experience it pays dividends to do something called testing. The idea is that you TRY your new software out before you put it LIVE.

Furthermore, the testing you do needs to cover as many things called TEST CASES as possible, and these TEST CASES reflect something called REAL LIFE.

Maybe it's a bad idea. Maybe it's cheaper just to lose all credibility as a vendor and to compensate thousands of people whose PCs you screw up.

What about Norton?

At least, McAfee offer compensation. With Norton, that kind of thing happened regularly when I worked there, not false-positives, but customers having pay Norton to fix Norton because Norton had screwed the computer up.

You see, it was cheaper for the punters to get a guy in to reinstall windows than to pay Norton 69 euro + hours of telephone with a great chance of not solving the issue. Sadly, customers did not know that. I cannot say how testing was done over at Norton's (they would sue me into bankruptcy).

The worst is, how do you justify ripping 69 euro of a punter for a bug YOUR software had and which caused havoc on the punters pc? How they get away with it, legally speaking, I dunno!

Like, Toyota recalls cars, bills customers extortionate rates for replacement of faulty parts ... is that possible? I would not think so ... The software industry is really incredibly laid-back, the legal systems in the world have not caught up with the software industry as it was in 1970, yet, let alone 2010....

For viri alone, get Solaris, Mac, Linux on that box!

what about me?

i spent the latter part of last week helping to fix 5000 affected machines for a customer of mine. 2 12 hour+ days and half my weekend gone because our friends couldn't properly test their latest update.

This was a deliberate

Yes, just thinking that McAfee screwing up royally like this would be a great way to prevent HP from buying them.

That said, whenever I've dealt with McAfee they've always been pretty helpful. Can't comment on the software itself, other than it seemed to be better than the Zonelabs one that it replaced, which in turn was a quantum leap over Norton.