McAfee VirusScan Plus Review

Product: VirusScan 2006 Price: $39.95 Vendor: McAfee Editor Rating: 3 1/2 stars Download Now!

Pros

+ Easy user interface
+ Good track record of frequent updates
+ Superior Protection

Cons

- More expensive than most products
- Limited free technical support
- Slow scan time

McAfee VirusScan Review

McAfee VirusScan is a "best-of-breed" product and certainly a sound choice. However, the price tag is 30% higher than most products, the scan time is slow, and customer support options are limited. Nevertheless, this is a high-quality product that you should definitely consider.

Usability

Installation of McAfee VirusScan was fast and easy, taking less than 5 minutes to finish. Installation is guided by an easy step-by-step wizard.

Effectiveness

McAfee VirusScan has recently passed certification tests from all three major testing labs (Virus Bulletin, ICSA, and Checkmark Level 2). To pass these tests, an antivirus program must successfully detect and disinfect all known viruses without generating any false positives. McAfee has not failed any certification tests since February 2005, which is quite good relative to most vendors.

(Editor's Note: AntiVirus tests should be performed by specialized testing labs to ensure that dangerous viruses are not released onto the internet.)

Ease of Use

McAfee VirusScan has an attractive and easy-to-use interface that is quite simple to use. They have laid out all of the major functions you might want to perform in a simple interface. These features include performing scans, managing quarantined files, configuring options, creating a rescue disk, and more.

The McAfee VirusScan user interface is well laid out and easy to use.

Other than kicking off an occasional scan, you will hardly ever need to interact with the program as it automatically runs in the background. By default, it will automatically scan floppy disks and CDs when they are inserted. It will also scan incoming email and memory resident programs as well.

The heart of the McAfee interface is their "SecurityCenter" interface. Like many other large companies, this interface is ostensibly meant to be a one-stop-shop for all of your computer security needs (firewall, privacy service, antivirus, and antispam). However, our experience has been that this is little more than a marketing ploy meant to push more product. We generally recommend against purchasing integrated bundles because you generally get one excellent and several sub-standard ones. McAfee is no exception (see our review of McAfee AntiSpyware)

While McAfee's marketing techniques aren't as agressive as they once were, the company still relies heavily on upsell tactics such as this "SecurityCenter" screen designed to get you to buy more products.

Another problem with McAfee is the slow scan time. A full scan took 80 minutes on our test computer, which is far longer than most other products. Our computer ran noticeably slower during scanning as well ... even Microsoft Outlook run sluggishly, taking nearly 30 seconds to open while a scan was in progress. For all practical purposes, you will need to set up the program to perform scans at night while your computer is unattended.

Updates

The program automatically checks for updates every day, although you can download updates manually as well. McAfee has a good track record of keeping their product up-to-date and is one of the leaders in the antivirus category.

To receive updates, you'll need to download McAfee's download manager. While this is seemingly harmless enough, we have found that these programs really get in the way of surfing and would much prefer if updates were performed from within the product.

Other Options

McAfee VirusScan is full of neat options that will be of interest to power users. These features include an integrated virus information database, the ability to get a real-time map of world virus activity, as well as the ability to test whether your installation is working correctly (it does this by downloading a fake virus which does no harm, but which is detected by the product when it's working correctly).

Customer Support

AntiVirus is a mature category and there are a number of great products with essentially similar protection characteristics. One area in which we've found that companies tend to most distinguish themselves are in customer support. McAfee customer support is definitely "self-service". They do provide online forums and FAQs for support. They also offer live chat and email support, but if you want immediate assistance, you will need to pay up for the privilege. We feel that this is a decided disadvantage with this product, especially given the $39.95 price tag (BitDefender

Summary

McAfee VirusScan is a "best-of-breed" product and certainly a sound choice. However, the price tag is 30% higher than most products, the scan time is slow, and customer support options are limited. Nevertheless, this is a high-quality product that you should definitely consider.

Download Now!