Hot Boyfriend Blog

So back in the day - about 7 years ago - Hot Boyfriend (that's me) lived in the city limits of St. Louis.  It was an old 3-story brownstone with beautifully detailed woodwork, high ceilings and large, heavy pocket doors - not like the ones today that collapse into splinters when you lean on them too hard.  It was a gorgeous house.  The neighborhood, however...not so much.  Very noisy and crime-ridden (my next-door neighbor murdered his girlfriend).  It also lacked a garage and had a postage-stamp sized back yard.  So, weighing the pros and cons, I decided to move to the suburbs. I sold the old house almost instantly for actually more than what I was asking!  Hmmm, maybe I should have reconsidered. 

But anyway, one thing I left behind was an awesome internet connection.  I had a DSL connection that screamed.  When I moved to South County, SouthWestern Bell, who was my DSL provider, allowed me to continue on my current plan and even hooked me up with newer equipment - how generous!  What they didn't tell me was that I was too far away from a switching station to get a good connection.  Also when I moved, I switched from cable TV to DirecTV satellite, which I was very pleased with for the clarity of the picture and the competitive pricing (more on that later).

It didn't take me long to figure out that my DSL connection - while still much better than dial-up - was not nearly as snappy as it had been in the city. I decided to try a different provider.  I called up DirecTV who was having a promotion on DSL service for DirecTV customers.  On the phone they were very pleased to sign me up and get everything set up.  A few days later they called up and said they would be unable to give me DSL as I was too far from a switching station to get their minimum speed.

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I bought a new computer recently from Dell. I have no major problems with Dell, but they like to put McAfee antivirus software on all their computers - sometimes even if you ask them not to. My previous experiences with McAfee have made me conclude that their software is more problematic than the virii they purport to protect you from. However, I decided to live with it on my new computer -- mistake! First of all, it likes to scatter icons for itself any place an icon will fit. And every few minutes, I would get annoying popups with warnings, suggestions, notices, advice, etc. etc. etc. It also seemed to be hitting the internet a lot, and there seemed to be no obvious way to stop all this insanity.

That's a lot of crap for software that's supposed to run in the background. I decided to remove the offending McAfee software once and for all. I opened my Windows XP control panel and started down the bumpy road to uninstalling McAfee. It seemed to go without a hitch - "software successfully removed." I decided to double check the "Program Files" directory to make sure it was gone and, lo and behold, there was a McAfee folder still sitting there mocking me.

What part of "uninstall" does McAfee not understand? I think it's the "un" part. I clicked the folder and hit delete as I waved bye-bye to it. Finally it was gone. But wait! What about the windows registry? (Don't get me started on that vile spaghetti-like database file.) I opened it up (not recommended for inexperienced Windows users so I won't tell you how) and searched for references to McAfee. There were only about 3......

.....-jillion that is. I wore my thumb and index finger out hitting "find next" and "delete" over and over and over and.......

Now it's finally gone...excised...surgically removed. ...Or is it? I won't ever know for sure unless/until it comes back to bite me in the ass somehow. So take this as a friendly warning: McAfee is more virus, spyware, and just plain annoyance than most of the stuff it claims to protect you from. Don't buy it or install it. If you're buying a new computer be sure to call the vendor and tell them NOT to install it.

Right now, I'm using Norton (or Symantic or whatever) antivirus, since I still think it's better to have something over nothing (an open source solution would probably be even better). So far nothing too bad has happened with Norton's solution. I'll let you know if that changes.

HB