computer problem?

Not being even slightly literate with computers, thought I’d run this past a few of you for a solution beofre I throw this thing away. I was directed by my isp that McAfee was unable to download any updates and to uninstall and reinstall Mcafee. I went to my control panel uninstalled it, shut down my computer, and tried to reinstall it yet it won’t reinstall.

Contacted Comcast, they directed me to McAfee people who had me go to start, run and type in CMD which I was told is my command prompt, well to make a long story short, nothing happened it didn’t work and they said they couldn’t help me and hung up.

So what is command prompt and how if possible can I fix it, I’ve tried downloading using IE and Firefox and neither will allow me to download anything to my computer? Other than being a nuisance and frustrating is this something a newbie can tackle? Any andvice is appreciated, thanks for your ideas and help.

how old is the pc? it sounds like it probably needs to be rebuilt.

The cmd prompt is really MS Dos. Why did they have you do that? Do you get an error when you try to reinstall Mcafee? What is the error saying exactly? Did Mcafee’s updates download and install automatically? There is a setting that lets you get notified, download, and download and install the updates automatically. Did you check this option to see what it was set to? I could try to walk you through it tonight on the phone if you are able to. What operating system are you using? XP or Vista? Do you still able to get on the Internet?

Eeeekkk Mccrappie (Mcafee) You’d be better off with Avast or Avg. I don’t usually recommend the free ones.

Other tools to download that might help you clean up the system:
malwarebytes
spybot

Antivirus Recommendations: Bitdefender, CA (Computer Associates (Norton 2009 might be doing beter, but earlier editions forget about them.

Just my opinion and I’m sticking to them….

drifter, i live in hastings also, and next week i would be available to look at this if you don’t get it running.

go into control panel, do an uninstall, then reboot, open windows explorer(right click on the start button, choose explore) go to C:\program files, and delete all mcafee folders.

go to start – search – and search for and delete all mcafee folders.

go to start – run – type “regedit” – in the registry, do a ctrl-F (press control and F key at the same time) and search for mcafee, delete everything it finds and continue to search until it doesn’t find anymore.

empty the recycle bin.

in windows explorer – c:\documents and settings\”your profile”\local settings\temp – delete all files in here

in windows explorer – c:\windows\temp – delete all files in here.

empty the recycle bin, reboot and then try to install mcafee again.

honestly, you do not even need to run antivirus software if you are careful about what you do online, and you will notice a performance increase.

I’ll ditto the recomendation on using AVG, a free software that I have had great success with.

Here’s someting to consider that was mentioned earlier in the thread: Your REGISTRY. Do your best to find a ‘registry edit’ cleaner. There are many out there that are good and some are free, others are $$, you do get what you pay for. Not going to endorse any ‘one’ of them, but some of these viruses ‘imbed’ on our registry and when you bott up, they reactivate. Just the nature of the beast. After you think your all cleaned up, I’d would back up and scap all import folders & files, and wipe the hard drive clean, and reload. Just remember to have a boot disk, (make one) and be sure your set to boot from CD (or whatever you have) Good luck and may the force be with you

it doesn’t necessarily appear that he has a virus, it just seems that mcafee is corrupt and won’t uninstall properly. I see this type of thing all of the time.