I run into an issue with Google Chrome not working on Windows 10 machine recently. It took me a whole day to figure it out, so hopefully this post saves someone the time.

It was a brand new Dell laptop pre-installed with Windows 10 Home edition. After installing all windows updates and updates from Dell I started installing additional software including Google Chrome. Immediately I noticed it was not loading any web site. In the same time Microsoft Edge was working fine.

I installed Firefox and it was working fine. At this point I started to wonder is Microsoft was sabotaging Google’s browser 🙂 It was not the case.

I also discovered I was not able to RDP to a remote machine. Cisco AnyConnect client would not connect to the VPN at work. It looked liked a more broad network issue. I tried several troubleshooting techniques including:

• network troubleshooting
• reset winsock
• reset proxy settings
• trying an older version of the network card driver
• trying a newer network card driver from Intel instead of Dell
• completely disabling the firewall

The day was spent Googling and trying different things to no avail. I good video I want to mention here is:

Unfortunately none of these techniques worked for me. And then while I was playing with the firewall I noticed this:

It turns out McAfee was controlling the firewall. It came pre-installed with Windows. Initially it is free but after several months you have to purchase a license if you want to keep using it. I decided to remove it and use the free version of Avast instead before installing all my other software. There were three entries with ‘McAfee’ in the ‘Apps & features’. I was able to un-install two of them. I could not remove the third one. I tried several time but each time the process would fail and a pop-up that looked like a browser would show up. It looked like a page that cannot be loaded. Too bad I did not take any screen-shot to show what I meant. Eventually I gave up and forgot about it until I saw the screen-shot above. It seemed what ever was left of McAfee was tempering with the firewall.

McAfee has a special tool which you can use to remove the software when the normal un-install does not work. Google this and you will find it:

“McAfee Consumer Product Removal tool” site:mcafee.com

Download the MCPR.exe and run in. It took almost 5 minutes for the tool to remove anything left of McAfee. This is on a machine with i& and SSD drive. It could take even longer on a slower machine. Be patient. When it is done, restart the computer.

After that everything was working just fine. I hope this helps someone out there.