So a little digging was needed to find out how to achieve the goal: A silent uninstall of McAfee LiveSafe (and all other McAfee Products) (For the Enterprise part of their software they provide a different tool called “Endpoint Product Removal Tool”, which seems to accept command line parameters.) Uninstalling via PowerShell did not work either. They don´t provide any command line parameters or uninstall information besides “Use Add/Remove programs” or “use the McAfee Consumer Products Removal Tool” with a Gui. Unfortunately McAfee seems to think that uninstalling their software should be really hard – they even put a captcha in the manual uninstall process!.

While doing this manually might be (and probably is) the best solution for a single device, uninstalling this software from “Add/Remove Programs” is not an option if you have to get rid of it on many PCs. How great would it be to have a clean Windows installed from the start for everyone? Customer Experience anyone? ) (Seriously Microsoft – You should make Windows less expensive to the OEMs so they “don´t have to” sell space for crapware on their customers computers. Silently uninstalling the McAfee LiveSafe bloatware trial version on a fresh installed Windows 10 PC.

And because this blogpost exists, you might assume correctly that this was not the case for the challenge I was facing: This is how my work on the topic I´m describing in this post started.

Do you know that feeling when you use your favorite search engine with “this should be easy, someone will already have figured out how to do this” in mind?

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