A Long Day at McAfee

A blog post said, “Don’t blame Mcafee.” Don’t blame Mcafee? I was down three days and way behind in my work. Up and running but still not working right at day five. And you’re making excuses for Mcafee? Well, Mcafee provides a service they claim the best, yet guess that’s now open to question. I’ve been twice to their support line, waiting over an hour both times, then having difficulty communicating with the techs. They don’t speak English very well. The first call got my computer up and running at day three after 3-hours on the phone — until I shut down for the evening. When I restarted the hard drive acted odd, blank screen, loaded slow, the mcafee splash took over five minutes to show on the screen, now it doesn’t always show at all, can’t perform a DOS superDat scan at the safe mode dos prompt, says illegal operation and screen loads with strange characters; easy network won’t load, the Virtual Tech program won’t load claiming I have to first reboot my computer to install a new update. And my ‘D’ drive acts damaged – recognized at start-up then drops off the board — I have years of files on that drive, backup is old, tried to back it up, but won’t do it. Although back on the net, seems ok there, the computer itself is still much slower to load at startup than before and all the other issues I mentioned. But they are trying to tell me I’m 100% protected so no problem. 100% PROTECTED FROM WHAT? Not the damage they have done to my computer, and not the time it has cost me trying to get it working as before. Do I now have to write the major press networks across this country until someone at Mcafee gets the clue that I’m not happy until they’ve restored my computer back up and running like before?

We will now be removing your software from our computers. You have lost our trust. say goodbye to 700 laptops!

My PC continually reboots. When given the choice of safe modes, start normally, etc., no matter the choce selected the machine reboots again. I can find no solution online and have caled McAfee support # and have been on hold 3 different times for more than an 1-1/2 hours each time and not gotten through. McAfee is supplied through my ATT/Yahoo DSL service. No help from them either. Thank goodness for a laptop with Trend Micro.

Is this an apology or a defiant excuse? I’m a design engineer at Intel regularly working 70-hour-week, and you are touting 14th hour “long-day” by you and some of your employees in this crisis you created?? There were thousands computers at my campus alone that were paralyzed for half day and beyond. What a “long-day” you created for your customers? Should I thank McAfee for giving me a rare break? No. Because of this mess I had to sleep even fewer hours to make it up, and skipped Wednesday’s lunch to manually fix 6 computers for myself and co-workers. You get paid to defend PCs against virus, not to behave like a virus. Yes, mistakes do happen, but your blog and your corporate response are insults to customers who paid you and entrusted you. That showed what kind of arrogant culture McAfee has. I hope some of your corporate customers will dump you because of this. And I’ll not buy any McAfee product for personal use.

Says the McAfee web site: “Because we value our loyal customers, if your PC was rendered inoperable or severely impaired as a result of the faulty file released you are eligible for a two year extension of your existing McAfee subscription free of charge.”

Wow! Two more years of McAfee! My recommendation: Get your security protection software changed ASAP! Too bad. They’ve been good in the past. But this one “Oh Sh*%” will put McAfee out of business or filing for bankruptcy within a year or two.

“Why didn’t McAfee send a notice to its subscribers? You have our emails for billing purposes and know which products we use.”

er-uh if if you don’t have internet access and your computer is toast what the good is a notice from the vendor going to do?

This stuff you call a protection “product” ins’t supposed to take down systems, let alone companies. This dribble you are peddeling brought down a fortune 500 companay for hours.

I trusted McAfee bucause my Hi-Tech employer did. No longer. I am NOT renewing my personal subscription.

HEY JT
and anyone else who thinks that you or I as a customer need to check the quality of an update!
That is like me getting a car fixed, then before taking the car out of the parking lot, make sure the repairs were done, asking the same mechanic to check it that fixed it.
I subscribe to an AV solution, giving them my confidence and paying them to make sure this kind of thing does not happen. I don’t care what kind of excuse they would give me, quality control should be a pretty high priority, especially crashing a whole row of computers, that is pretty unacceptable. I support more than 200 users, vastly using XP SP3. I don’t have the time or manpower, do it all myself, to check every piece of software, every update, everything that runs through my network. WHY SHOULD I HAVE TO CHECK EVERY LITTLE DETAIL? that is what i am paying the company to do, the ones that are putting out the AV updates! If my current AV solution started going this route, i would hose them and find something different. THINK TOYOTA!!

I think admitting to the mistake and also giving people a refund would greatly help the IMAGE of McAfee. People don’t want to hear how hard or long McAfee technicians are working, nor speak to their incompetent technicians. They want to hear: “We are very sorry this happened, we would like to help you get back to work, or pleasure, we will refund you for expenses incurred and make sure it WILL NOT and CANNOT and WON’T EVER EVER EVER HAPPEN AGAIN.”

I have used various AVs and they all have their flaws, symantecs heavy system resource usage, AVG network edition not detecting viruses that have been out since 2006, having to renew a Avira subscription every six months, etc etc. This one is definitely the one that has taken first prize in failures. Imagine you are the reason for the failure of hospitals, banks, businesses, government agencies, websites, airlines, trains, you name it, its been shutdown. This is not a virus, but, like someone said, an ANTIVIRUS COMPANY.
Can’t even eat at my favorite restaurant because their credit card machine is linked to the cash register, which uses McAfees AV.

Is this representative of the layoffs and budget cuts McAfee has been making over the previous few months?

I am from Austria with 3 machines running Vista Business, one with Vista Ultimate and one with XP. The machines running Vista Business ran into deep troubles after having installed McAfee updates two days ago with IE8 breaking down completely. Though I checked McAfee homepage in German and English I got no clue on what was going on. By chance I read an article on McAfee´s big problems worldwide in an Austrian daily paper today and was able to fix my Vista Notebooks an hour ago. Mind: It cost me two days to find out!! So McAfee: Please dont give me empty PR talk´! I simply hate it!

Just how in the HELL are we to aply a fix to a computer that endlessly Re-BOOTS? DUH? Fortunately I had a NORTON Save and Restore Copy of my C and E drives and restored EVERYTHING B4 your Update. I’m switching to the Norton/Symanted product and Dumping yours.

After two days, there is still no clear communication about this huge problem on McAfee website. And why don t you write to all your customers to apologize and to give them the solution (which is rather easy to implement) ? I was ready to reinstall my computer from scratch, losing all my data, when I have fortunately seen information about the McAfee problem on a computer magazine site. To make a mistake is always possible, but not communicating with your customers about it is unforgivable.

Boy, now I’m glad Comcast quit supporting McAfee and switched me to Norton last week!

having to take down our entire company to avoid a “virus” was bad. having to wait until the following day for a fix was worse. Our 2 engineers figured out the problem in 3 hours and made their own fix, which works better than the mcafee (and arrived 12 hours earlier).

I take issue with a number of items. The first is this idea that a small percentage were affected. On ALL WinXP SP3 machines, this destroyed them. 100%. We avoided by shutting down for hours!

The second is that due diligence and testing were done, and this slipped by. How much is Microsoft paying you to try and force users to purchase Windows7? I hope it will recover the costs of all your XP customers defecting, because apparently you dont have a *single* XP machine fully patched to current release from microsoft!!! A single one! Thats comforting…

So – you might as well fire your whole testing and qa team – they arent helping. Maybe outsource it to a software company. I hear microsoft can do it, just not on windows XP.

http://www.response-it.co.uk/blog/news/mcafee-update-problem-deletion-of-svchost-exe-no-windows-xp-taskbar

You can see our fix here , what I would like know is about reimbursement for our customers who have had to engineers to each of their sites? I would least expect a refund of their existing product so they can move to something more reliable!

I’m from Italy, I had only 1 critical computer in my office hit by this “issue”, but it took nearly all day to realize what was happening, and only because a news post flashed for a few minutes in google news: probably you already guessed that it was the only pc running McAfee and that it was promptly uninstalled afterwards. I agree with the folks saying that it was not a mistake, but a major negligence letting this update out. I won’t surely suggest it to anyone seeking my advice.
Thanks McAfee for wasting my time (and money).

Linux. Really.

Yes, mistakes happen but the company’s response has been miserable. I contacted the technical support group, was transferred to another who gave me a toll-free number to call which turned out to be disconnected. Another call reuslted in a half hour call with someone who had no idea what to do (how many times do I tell you I can’t boot my machine!)and he said he would send me a link to connect with an on-line technician. 24 hours later. No link.

I think it is very disappointing that McAfee made no effort to communicate with its clients about the problem. Additionally, the website still has not posted anything prominently about the issue. Having a small link about a false positive is not as clear as saying “Attention XP Users: DAT file may be disrupting your operating system.”

Why didn’t McAfee send a notice to its subscribers? You have our emails for billing purposes and know which products we use. Since I didn’t learn about the true cause of the issue until CNET (not McAfee) announced this Thursday afternoon, I wasted most of Wednesday afternoon and Thursday morning attempting my own fixes based on symptoms. Then I needed to spend Thursday afternoon and this morning, fixing the computer again because my “fixes” created new issues.

Had McAfee sent an email with the link to the fix, I could have spent less than 30 minutes, instead of approximately 10 hours trying to fix one of our older workstations.

How will McAfee be easing the pain of its customers?

Wheew, I sure am glad I stopped using McAfee years ago. I am REALLY sorry that my federal agency stil uses this product. I oversee support for over 5,000 desktops for a major HHS OpDiv and I have never seen an entire agency grind to a halt like what happened Wednesday and Thursday. We had to touch over 5,000 machines in 24 hours while untold amounts of US Taxpayers dollars just got flushed down the toilet.

Way to go McAfee. As for me, I’ll stick to AVG.