Do I need that McAfee security on my laptop?

I would get rid of it. McAfee is pretty terrible. If you have Windows 10, you have Windows Defender which is built-into Windows and is generally good enough for most users. If you want to use a 3rd party anti-virus, I would look into ESET NOD32. Its a lightweight and pretty unobtrusive anti-virus solution. I use it on a few machines at home and it has worked well for me.

Already mentioned, but yeah, get rid of it. Unfortunately most (larger) AV vendors feel the need to cramp more and more in their security software, and it just becomes big and slower.

Defender might be good enough.

Just always make sure you have only 1 AV software active since it will affect your computer's performance.

Thank you!  I appreciate the helpful answers!

So long as you have SOME kind of protection 

enabled (and the fact that it expired two years 

ago), then yes feel free to get rid of it. As for 

your slowdown issues, you may want to look 

at ALL of the apps you have -- how many of 

them are actually necessary of useful? You 

may have a bunch of them loaded right at 

startup that serve no real purpose or are 

only needed on rare occasions. Another 

issue is registry clutter, and there are 

several other things that may slow 

your system down. You might want 

to find an optimizer/tune-up app to 

help you with some of these things... 

there are several, and most of them 

offer both a free level of service and 

a more sophisticated paywall level. 

Note that everything these apps do 

can be done by hand, but can also 

be quite tedious. Also note that the 

improvements you (might) see won't 

necessarily be huge, but may at least 

help you somewhat. I've included a 

link (in 'Sources" below) to an article 

discussing several of them. 

thats up to you