I use a McAfee security product (free through my work
[a]) on my computers at home. Up until this switch, I've always had an up-to-date Norton Internet Security product.
I have my scans scheduled to run in the background while I'm sleeping (I know, I'm bad and leave the netbook on most nights), so I don't normally need to deal with McAfee's Security Center (MSC) interface. Recently, I wanted to go check out some settings, so I tried to open up MSC and all I got was a blank screen. Tried to verify my subscription was current - but couldn't since my user profile didn't have sufficient admin privileges. Stopped the MSC process from the Task Manager, restarted, same issue. Logged into the admin profile, verified my subscription was current, that the software was up-to-date, tried to open the MSC up again - and got the same blank screen.
Started poking around the interwebz - figuring that since these self-help steps didn't fix it, surely someone else must be having a similar problem.
I put
mcafee security center is blank into Google. Dates of the results in the order they appeared (including the sub/related results):
- 2006-11-05
- 2009-04-08
- 2009-01-03
- 2008-09-12
- 2009-04-12
- 2009-01-25
- 2010-09-27
First, it struck me that people were having the exact same issue four years ago. Either lots of bad user error or something hasn't been fixed by now... Looked at some of the earlier ones, along with the 2010 result, and learned something that I found to be quite astonishing:
McAfee Security Center relies on Internet Explorer as it uses HTML to display.
But that is not all. MSC relies on IE, but it will
only rely on (some?) stable versions.
Many,
many posts related to MSC show how beta versions of IE cause MSC to break. The bottom line from a
Microsoft help site:
In simple terms you can either use McAfee or IE9
So, I ask:
Whose brilliant idea was this to develop a product that
requires
- Windows to be fully patched (ok, so that's a great idea, but if you can't patch it, you can't have McAfee virus protection?),
- IE to not be beta (so you can't even try to be a "techie" or get "with" a new browser roll-out and use McAfee?),
- relies on a Microsoft product as the engine for making the program run properly, and
- can't default to another browser if the IE version isn't supported (what did they do with McAfee for Macs? force you to install IE? build it on another HTML platform? what a novel idea...)?
Ugh.
So, either I stop playing with IE9, or have a functionally impotent virus scan product. Or find another (free?) security suite to replace this craziness.
[a] I found it somewhat humorous that shortly after our office IT switched to McAfee, a flawed definitions update file that got pushed to McAfee customers
crippled untold numbers of Windows machines. Doh!
