McAfee VirusScan Home 9.0 user reviews

Pros Pretty box

Cons M$ IE required, Pop-ups, marketing junk, no logging, etc.

Summary The new version 9 of McAfee VirusScan 2005 has some serious problems over previous versions.

1. It REQUIRES Microsoft Internet Explorer to be the default web browser or it will not update. MS IE has been determined to be the weakest browser on the market and Firefox, Opera and others cannot be the default. MS IE has many security holes and for a security company to mandate that you use a browser that's not secure is just nonsense.

2. You now need to also include McAfee's marketing tool called "Security Center" that constantly reminds you that you don't have all the McAfee products installed.

3. There's no logging ability any more so you never know what's going on, if a virus has been detected, if updates actually occurred and such.

4. If you're into games, video editing and other activities where pop-up's will get in the way, you need to completely shutdown VirusScan or the pop-ups will hinder your gaming pleasure or your work. They do cause the system to slow down while they load and then you also get a second pop-up asking to clean your system. Shutting down VirusScan to do work kind of defeats the purpose of even having it.

5. There is no way to exclude files from being checked so if you run a firewall or BlackIce that captures evidence logs, VirusScan will pop-up all the time when the firewall logs get information. There is no way to avoid the constant notices because you cannot exclude these files.

Had I known it had these limitations and problems, I would have never spent the money on this package.

Pros pretty box

Cons Says it is up-to-date when it isn't

Summary I found that this product was lying to me. It was telling me that it was up-to-date when, in fact, it had never done an update from the day it was installed!

Customer support was worthless. They had me reinstall repeatedly but that did not resolve the problem.

Documentation was basically non-existant. Just a single piece of paper that requires you to return IE to all it's defaults. Then is says to DELETE ALL OFFLINE CONTENT! I don't think so!

But the big problem was that Firefox was my default browser and McAfee won't work with that. It requires ActiveX support too!

When a security company requires you to make your system less secure to run their product, I get concerned. When they require you to change it's configuration and default applications to run their product, I get scared.

Thank God for rebates so I'll have received the product for free and will purchase a decent anti-virus product whenever I receive the checks from the rebates.

Pros Never got it to install, so there are no pros!

Cons Wouldn't install and then they have the never to charge for support!

Summary I was running Virusscan 8 and pretty much had no problems except the annoying window that came up every time I logged on. When my subscription came do, I got stupid and upgraded to verion 9 instead of renewing the subscription.

I could never get the thing to install. I was going to call for support until I realized that they charge $2.95 per minute. I went to their website and followed every instruction I found in the forums to the letter. They had me deleting stuff and editing my registry and on and on. Nothing worked.

I have worked with computers for years and I really don't think that everyday users should be expected to have to edit their registry to get software to install.

I called to get a refund and now I am without antivirus protection until I can fins something else.

I will NEVER buy a McAfee product again!

Pros Professional version includes licenses for two machines

Cons Update problem on both my machines that makes it useless

Summary I've installed the professional version on both machines at home and the software can't update its own virus definitions. It claims that everything is up-to-date, but closer investigation shows that the DAT file is over 3 months old! I have spent hours with tech support trying to resolve the issue, but they keep telling me to reinstall which is not solving the problem. I now have to go out and spend more money to get software that actually works. Will never use McAffee again...