Do I really need a recovery drive to remove McAfee from my laptop?

Honestly, just Google for a solution! It's pretty straightforward to remove McAfee without the recovery drive. Just uninstall it and double-check with a cleanup tool.

Nah, creating a recovery drive just to remove McAfee is overkill. You should be fine with the normal uninstall process. Make sure to run MCPR to clear out any leftovers. If all goes well, you can just enjoy your laptop with Defender.

You actually don't need a recovery drive to ditch McAfee. Just uninstall it through your settings, and then run McAfee's cleanup tool to make sure all remnants are gone. After that, Windows Defender should reactivate itself automatically! The recovery drive is more for restoring the laptop to its original factory state, which usually brings back all the pre-installed junk. If your laptop feels clean after the cleanup, you're all set! But if you want to be super thorough, you might consider backing up your files and doing a clean install of Windows using Microsoft’s installation media instead.

It sounds like the store employee might have been a bit unclear. What they probably meant was that you should create a USB installation stick to do a fresh install of Windows, which would completely remove McAfee and any other bloatware your laptop came with. If you ever decide to go that route, you can follow the official guide from Microsoft for creating installation media. But if you're okay with your system now, you don’t need to go through that hassle.