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McAfee Viruscan keeps disabling on my Dell Studio XPS
I hope someone can help. I have a 4 month old Dell Studio XPS laptop tunning vista. I also have Dell PC Tune Up and McAfee Securitycenter and anti virus. I worked fine for 3 months but now my McAfee viruscan is automatically turned off and won't update so my laptop is not protected. I've uninstalled and installed it several times but within 2 hours the same thing hapens again. Could PC Tune up be corrrupting McAfee ? Is it a virus (i've tun lots of anti virus scans and nothing comes up). I'm not a IT expert just a home user - any advice greatly appreciated. Chattymoppet
joe53
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January 11th, 2010 21:00
Hi Chattymoppet, and welcome;
Dell typically pre-installs time-limited trial versions of security software, including McAfee. Is it possible that you had a McAfee trial version that has expired?
If you did subscribe to, and pay for McAfee (typical subscriptions are for one year) did you purchase it through Dell, or from McAfee directly?
I don't use McAfee myself, but can't help noticing the posts here about it conflicting with other security software:
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19305291.aspx
http://community.mcafee.com/message/85584#85584
I once tried Dell's PC Tune Up, but like several others here uninstalled it for various reasons. Mostly because it didn't do anything I couldn't do by myself, or with other free utilities. I have not missed it, and don't see any particular reason to have it.
In the meantime, it is important you have real-time AV protection. If your McAfee has expired, I can recommend you download/install the free Microsoft Security Essentials (MSE):
http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/default.aspx
If your McAfee has not expired, but just is not working, I suggest you post to their user self-help forum here:
http://community.mcafee.com/community/help
Irktou
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January 11th, 2010 21:00
I have had similar problems with mcafee securtiy center.One was blocking a register change that mcafee alerted me to which was my internet connection "svhost" . After blocking it the only way to connect was to use the system restore to just before I blocked the reg change. Which I bring up as one suggestion and I know from experiance that mcafee's tech support is usually not much help, unless you consider tech support telling you to reinstall for every problem helpful without explianing why it happened in the first place. If you uninstal make sure to use the mcafee removal tool, though I have had problems with that too. As you didn't mention if it was a cd or site reinstall, I'll mention that if you download from the site to turn off your pop-up blocker and set browser to default. And you didn't mention if you tried the "fix protection" worked or was showing . If you reinstal after uninstalling a restarting do a disk cleanup. Hope some this is helpful. good luck.
Chattymoppet
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January 11th, 2010 23:00
Thanks for your replies. My subscription is until 2012 so it has not expired and tthe installs I did were from the McAfee site and I did use their uninstaller prior to this. I have also tried tthe McAfee fix protection and that also didn't work as it said files were missing. I've spoken to 3 different McAfee Support people who seems to have given up and said that it might be to do with my Windows security settings but they couldn't change these and I needed to contact Microsof - but to be honest I really don't understand what this means, how to contact Microsoft or what to ask them for.
joe53
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January 12th, 2010 01:00
You said you ran lots of antivirus scans that came up negative.
Which scans did you run? It is important to have only one AV running in real-time. When running a "second-guess" on-demand AV scan (e.g. an online scanner) I always temporarily disable my resident AV, to avoid conflicts.
I can't answer your questions about Microsoft, but suspect McAfee is conflicting with some other security program. It sounds like you have a McAfee Internet Security Suite, so I would disable and/or uninstall any other security programs that you have, including PC Tune Up. From what I've seen here, McAfee doesn't play well with them.
It's also possible that malware has disabled your AV. You might want to repost this in the Malware Removal forum:
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/3521.aspx
Before posting there, read this first:
http://en.community.dell.com/forums/t/19251122.aspx
Best of luck!
Irktou
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January 12th, 2010 15:00
As joe stated "mcafee does not play well with others...". In general any other AV running will affect the mcafee instal though you stated it was running . As for changing the security settings you should be signed on as admin and should need nothing more than turning of your pop up blocker and making sure that everything is set to default in your internet browser and privacy settings. As for the contacting microsoft you maybe able to use the event log to see if the conflict is showing up there and if so you can submit the log from a link in event log that might have an answer to the problem, though few events get a solution this way and you may be directed to the knowledge page. good luck.