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Q: I use McAfee Total Protection as my antivirus.  I’ve tried to run other anti-malware products but the McAfee product tells me that they interfere with it and have to be removed.  I’ve used AdAware, Spybot Search and Destroy, and Malwarebytes in the past but always see the popups from McAfee.  When I once had to reinstall McAfee after a computer issue, the McAfee would not let me do so as long as the competing software was installed  Is there actually a problem? Or is McAfee just protecting its brand?

– Ed R.
Fort Walton Beach, Florida

A: I am not a big fan of that particular product, as you’ll see if you do a search for McAfee in the column archive on my website.  Once upon a time, I actually used, and was quite happy with McAfee, but that was in the days when choices for protection were pretty much limited to McAfee and Norton.  I suspect that McAfee is relying a little too much on the success from those days, because these days, McAfee doesn’t always take the high road.  For example, it is prone to tricks such as installing a bunch of separate products when you perform a single installation, and even leaving pieces of itself behind to nag you to upgrade after you’ve fully uninstalled it.  It also ranks behind a fair number of its competitors, as evidenced by a recent PC World article comparing the top-10 protection packages in which McAfee didn’t even make the list.

As for your particular issue, it is possible that McAfee could be incompatible with other products.  In a lot of ways, protection software acts like the very malware it is trying to defeat, particularly when it is installing or updating.  However, those of McAfee’s competitors that I have experience with don’t seem to have the problem of needing to be the lone protection software on a system.  That would seem to make it McAfee’s problem, not the other softwares’.  The choice of how to proceed is up to you, of course, but the logical course of action would be to eliminate the problem child.

Q: Every few days we see tiny flying bugs–maybe the size of a pixel–around our computers. It is about impossible to swat them, they are so fast and so tiny. Is there is risk that they will harm the innards of the computers, and is there any spray that is safe to use around computers? Thanks for your advice, we appreciate your articles in the paper.

– Nancy L.
Shalimar, Florida

A: Why Nancy, those are simply computer bugs escaping from your software!  Or, I suppose they could be computer viruses that have gotten out of your system – I hear some of those are pretty fast, but I always thought they were too small to be seen with the naked eye.

On the off chance you’re serious about your question, I’d have to say that you’re probably asking the wrong guy – you need to be directing your questions to an exterminator, not a computer geek.  If you have bugs around the computer, chances are you have them elsewhere, and you’re only seeing the ones around the computer because of the contrast against your monitor.  I doubt that bugs could be around in sufficient quantity to harm a computer, and there is no bug spray that I would trust to be sprayed on or around any of my computers, because the chemicals in the overspray could damage a system’s finish.  You’d have far more to worry about if the propellant or bug killing chemicals got on the inside of your system than the bugs themselves.