Mcafee Virusscan Plus 2007 Views

• Software

New VirusScan Plus combines trusted 3-in-1 protection--anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall into a single, always-on, always up-to-date service to guard your hard drive, digital photos, music files, financial records, privacy, and Web browsing. VirusScan Plus automatically looks for known and unknown threats in e-mail, downloads, IM, and media. If problems are found, it immediately attempts to clean, quarantine, or delete infections with minimal interruption to your work. Meanwhile pro-active spyware blocking and firewall protection help stop dangerous programs like key-loggers from trying to launch on your system and hackers from invading your PC. Also includes McAfee SiteAdvisor safe surfing protection.

McAfee has redesigned its antivirus application, VirusScan Plus, to provide three security tools--antivirus, firewall, antispyware--plus a package of system performance utilities in one product. On the surface that sounds great, but the changes appear to be only cosmetic. Looking inside, we found that McAfee offers few new security tools and also runs several agents and services that could slow older PCs. And we're still not impressed with McAfee's own lackluster technical support package. For brand-name protection, this year we give the edge to Symantec, whose Norton Antivirus 2007 shows the most improvement over last year's product. However, we give our Editors' Choice to Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0.

Setup McAfee VirusScan Plus is available in retail stores and for download from the McAfee.com site. We found the setup from a download to be unnecessarily hard. For example, McAfee requires that you install its Download Center, then after the Download Center analyzes your system, you must indicate what product you want to download. But wait, there's more: the Download Center must now connect to the Internet and download the file, which for VirusScan Plus is in individual pieces--VirusScan, Personal Firewall, SiteAdvisor, and Security Center. On a wireless laptop, our initial download-and-installation process took about an hour. On a LAN connection, a second installation required only 10 minutes. What's interesting is that unlike other antivirus-and-firewall combos we've seen, McAfee VirusScan Plus doesn't require a reboot.

Once installed, McAfee VirusScan Plus 2007 occupies 75MB of hard drive space--that's less than half the space required for Norton Antivirus 2007. Yet despite its small profile, McAfee actually runs more agents and services, consuming more system resources overall than Norton. Unlike Norton, which is strictly Windows XP, McAfee installs on both Windows 2000 and Windows XP machines.