Removing all trace of McAfee Dell XPS 13

Interesting, I’ve always been able to uninstall it just using Programs and Features. If you’re just seeing something in the Start menu I wouldn’t worry about it. Microsoft is using people’s Start menus as ad space now, so you’ll see all kinds of apps in there that aren’t actually installed but will install if you click them. You can usually remove them, but they or some other apps will take their place later. This is how Microsoft is making Windows 10 “free”.

But do yourself a favor and don’t install some other third-party anti-virus. These days they typically cause more problems than they solve, or at the very least are some combination of bloated, expensive, noisy with respect to notifications, etc., and can end up interfering legitimate activity on a system or rendering systems unbootable after a Windows update because the AV software had been hooking the system in some way that Microsoft changed and never supported in the first place. And then there have been cases where a bug in AV software has CREATED a massive security hole on people’s systems that wouldn’t have existed otherwise. Turns out when your application inserts itself into everything that goes on within a system like AV does, a flaw in your code can be exploited by something running just about anywhere on that system, including coming in over the network.