McAfee - taking unauthorised payments, help please!

PhylPho

McAfee is notorious for auto-renewal. It's there in the small print but why not in the large print? (Answer: how're they gonna make a profit out of the punters otherwise?)

McAfee pays computer sellers like Dell an absolute fortune to have their software pre-installed. It's a fantastic way of getting the gullible to renew the, er, temporary subscriptions. And then get hammered on an auto-renewal. It only takes one auto-renewed customer to pay once, and McAfee (and othes like it) are reeling in the profits from an unwitting user base of hundreds of thousands.

Truth is, if you're a home user, you don't need *ANY* paid-for AV. Nor *ANY* paid-for firewall. Nor *ANY* paid-for so-called Internet Security Suite.

All this commercial bloatware was long since trounced by freeware like Avast and Online Armor (and numerous others.) And it's been further buried thanks to Microsoft's excellent work -- never thought I'd say that about Microsoft -- with Microsoft Security Essentials:

http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/

Yes, there'll be people who still say a home user should be running stuff like Norton (aaagh!) or Kaspersky (much better, but hardly worth the price.) Ignore 'em.

A sensible teaming of freeware such as MSE with Windows built-in firewall and WinPatrol Free and Malwarebytes Free is as good as anything costing a load of dosh. (Note: that configuration isn't exclusive, there are other software combos around as effective -- well, providing you have WinPatrol as a stape ingredient in the mix.)

Lots of good info on the MSE Tech Board -- and even more on one of the best reference source websites of 'em all, where there's even a special section on security freeware with a walk-through "wizard" that's ideal for everyone whether they know anything about computing or not:

http://www.techsupportalert.com/SecWiz

Moral: as soon as you buy a new computer, uninstall *all* the paid-for commercial security software that came with it and replace it with freeware. That way you'll never get victimised by the auto-renewal scam ever again.