McAfee Update is Shutting Down Windows XP PCs

[NoGooD]

Hey guys..just ran across this and figured I'd throw a heads up to anyone having this problem. Hope it won't affect to many.

 

A bad update issued today for McAfee for Windows XP is causing computers worldwide to shutdown and sent itself in a loop of restarts. Engadget received the following statement from McAfee regarding the continuing incident:

 

McAfee is aware that a number of customers have incurred a false positive error due to incorrect malware alerts on Wednesday, April 21. The problem occurs with the 5958 virus definition file (DAT) that was released on April 21 at 2.00 PM GMT+1 (6am Pacific Time).

 

Our initial investigation indicates that the error can result in moderate to significant performance issues on systems running Windows XP Service Pack 3.

 

The faulty update has been removed from McAfee download servers for corporate users, preventing any further impact on those customers. We are not aware of significant impact on consumer customers and believe we have effectively limited such occurrence.

 

McAfee teams are working with the highest priority to support impacted customers and plan to provide an update virus definition file shortly. McAfee apologizes for any inconvenience to our customers

 

The story is that the DAT update 5958 deletes the svchost.exe file, which then triggers a false-positive in McAfee itself. Early estimates say that this has affected between 30,000 to 60,000 machines so far.

[gigabyte]

Never trusted McAfee, it came free with my isp but i never used it.

[JoeDirt]

only nubs use AV

[Papito]

LoL i don't use Anti Virus Anymore, better formatting.

[NoGooD]

I like this bit of sensationalism from an Engadget headline

 

"Botched McAfee update shutting down corporate XP machines worldwide"

 

Or in otherwords...say goodbye to McAfee's market share. Someone at Symantec just peed their pants a little.

[ultraman]

Get Avast or AntiVir, theyre both free and dont cause probs like mcaffee. I tried mcaffee once and the program caused my system to come to a near stand still. Its no joke, it did. My advice would be to use the other two I mentioned... Good luck!!!!

[PHANTASM]

I actually bought Norton Systemworks in 2003 and have been using it on this computer ever since. I reformat the computer when it gets dysfunctional and Norton is one of the programs I always re-install, and it always works. It's caught many viruses over the years that other security apps missed.

 

I don't run any antivirus on my other computer because I don't use it on the web except for games, and I don't let anyone else use it. This one I'm on now is just for websurfing and lots of friends/family use it. My kids use it too so it gets totally focked up.

 

Norton is the best imho.

[Livyatan]

Avast

 

I used to use McAfee long ago, but always f***ed up my computer every time.

[NoGooD]

Personally I use NOD32, but I used avast for a long time and it worked great. I'm not about "which AV is better than the other", but there seems to be alot more people that have problems with AVG, McAfee & Norton than some of the others mentioned here.

 

I just remember the good old days with Norton and McAfee were the best around, until you tried to uninstall them and you couldn't boot your comp anymore.

[Papito]

Just make a partition of your DD or DD's one for OS and other for Files, and re install, if you have issues with malwares, use Anti Malwarebytes!

[Higgeo]

I have mcafee. I love it! It worked well ad there is heaps of consumer support. I'm running win 7 so it wont affect me.