Named & Shamed
Keumars Afifi-Sabet puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and misbehaving software
SOFTWARE WARNING!McAfee’s ‘18% per cent memory’ pop-ups
When is a pop-up advert not a pop-up advert? When it’s delivered by McAfee’s antivirus software, and you get two conflicting excuses from the company.
This saga began when reader Patrick Wilmore sent us screenshots of a McAfee pop-up that appeared on his screen. It claimed that his “available memory” was 18 per cent ( 1in our screenshot), and warned that anything below 30 per cent could impact a PC’s “speed and performance” 2 . Other alerts showed his memory at 14 and 19 per cent.
Patrick doubted these claims straight away. His PC has a hefty 32GB of RAM, and he was running only Outlook when the warning popped up. He then checked Task Manager and found that he actually had around 80-per-cent free RAM.
Growing suspicious, he spoke online to a McAfee support agent, who called the warning a “promotional popup alert” (an ‘advert’ in other words) for its PC-cleaning tool PC Optimizer. Pay £49.99 and “with just a few clicks” you’ll get an “instant boost to your system’s performance”.
What’s going on here? Is McAfee really trying to scare users with fake claims about declining memory in order to sell software? When we enquired, it told us the pop-ups had been caused by “a product bug causing inaccurate reporting of memory usage”.
That seems to suggest McAfee has designed these adverts to appear when PC memory is low, but that a “bug” has made them pop up randomly. We doubt that’ll be of comfort to Patrick and others. They don’t want to be pestered with such annoyances, whether they’re accurate or not.
McAfee told us it’s “working hard to resolve the issue”, but it’ll be too late to keep Patrick’s business. He plans to cancel the “appalling” service in February when his contract expires. If the pop-ups continue many more will do likewise.
