Entered CNET Catalog: 09/14/2004
SKU: MIS70E001RCA
Manufacturer: McAfee
Manufacturer description
The Internet provides a wealth of information and entertainment at your fingertips. Yet, as soon as you connect, your computer is exposed to a multitude of privacy and security risks. The best defense is a multi-layered approach with McAfee Internet Security. McAfee's all-in-one security suite incorporates award-winning McAfee technology so that you can surf, shop, download and email in confidence. Easy to install, configure and use, McAfee Internet Security helps safeguard personal data, prevent viruses, stop unauthorized computer access, filter spam from your inbox and block pop-up ads-all in one powerful, fully integrated package. Best of all, automatic updates ensure you always have the latest protection.User opinions
Select a User Opinion to view: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37
User Rating: 
1/10
Big Brother Is Here
Pros: Can Be Uninstalled
Cons: Difficult To Uninstall
Mcafee's new Site Advisor product is operated by bots and recently by people with nothing better to do, than trash their competitions sites. McAfee operates this component as a competition among reviewers to see who can hammer the most sites. Anyone can be a reviewer, it requires no expertise, just an agenda and the desire to compete. The one consistency throughout the reviews was the dislike of affiliate marketing, which Amazon, Ebay and McAfee all use.
I would advise everyone to steer clear of this beast as it is trying to force it's meaningless rating system on the search engines. The end result is, McAfee controls the content you see. If you want big brother, this is the product for you. All Others Steer Clear. BTW, I am a McAfee Advisor site reviewer.
User Rating: 1/10
Horrible product & horrible service
Pros: I found NO Pros
Cons: Lousy product, horrible service, NO refund available
User Rating: 
3/10
Do not buy from these people !!!
Pros: It's hard to think of any
Cons: Poor support
Everything was going fine with McAfee, OK it was v. resource hungry to say the least, but I figured it was a trade off for "good protection".
Then one day I discovered (shortly after renewing the security suite subscription, I might add) that I started getting a problem popup alerting me of an installation problem. This was totally out fo the blue.
This thing would not go away, and as soon as you closed it down it opened 3 seconds later. The only "solution" was to shutdown virusscan.
As I was going away for 3 months , I decided that a solution would probably be in place by the time I got back.
So 3 months later, you guessed it , the problem was still there. I installed/unistalled the whole suite repeatedly. Then I started researching on the net , and to my horror found that this had been going on for about 3 years. And that the "support" threads provided by mcafee gave advice of the kind "er, try this it might work". From reading the threads you could see people were absoloutely tearing their hair out because the suggested fixes did not work. The more I looked the more I realized that this is such a big problem that McAfee either know about it and don't care, or know about it and figure it is too costly to fix or simply don't have a solution.
I wrote and complained vociferously, and the only energy they put into the response was to let me know that I was not entitled to a refund.
It is only the fact that the internet user statutory rights are still a bit blurred that allows McAfee to get away with this, imagine if you bought sky TV for a year and then it stopped working after 2 months, would that mean that you were not entitled to a pro-rated refund ? In the world of McAfee is means precisely that.
Do yourself a huge favour, avoid these clowns like the plague. I have switched to Norton, so far (touch wood) no problems (oh and it doesn't seem to gobble the resource either) ....
User Rating: 1/10
I will never buy from McAfee Again Ever As Well and Neither Should You
Pros: None - wait - doesn't blow up my computer - yet
Cons: Everything - you name it
User Rating: 1/10
really slow, really hard to get rid of
Pros: none none none none
Cons: slow, buggy, hard to remove
User Rating: 1/10
Inadequacy of free support may be this product's most obvious feature.
Pros: It can be purchased as a free upgrade if you mail the paperwork on time.
Cons: It can lock you out of the internet which is the only source of free support.
This program has a privacy feature which can prevent others from getting into the internet. That is a good thing when it works for you. It is a disaster when it doesn't.
It failed yesterday. First I started getting pop-ups that asked me to "verify" my internet security programs. The "verify" privacy pop-up kept recycling. All I could get was "Cannot Find" messages. After some experimenting I discovered that my internet security programs were "expired". This was despite my supposedly being eligible for free updates through March 29, 2005.
I finally achieved access to the McAfee help page by removing all vestiges of this internet security product. I notified McAfee customer service of what had happened. I have yet to receive a response.
User Rating: 
10/10
The best Anti-Virus App
Pros: Good protection and fast
Cons: Not free, no con
User Rating: 
2/10
Not so Hot antivirus
Pros: nothing to mention
Cons: didn't pick up viruses, makes computer run slow
User Rating: 1/10
McAfee Internet Security is abysmal
Pros: Nothing to say in favour of this product
Cons: Will not uninstall, Privacy does not work, rubbish customer service
The privacy function would not install and customer service after hours spent online with them could not rectify the problem.
The software will not fully uninstall and has left ports open, customer service took days to respond to a refund request, and the backupp disc never did get delivered.
I have nothing to say in favour of McAfee and will never use them again.
User Rating: 1/10
Don't buy this software!
Pros: I was unable to find any.
Cons: Could possibly lock down your internet access.
User Rating: 
9/10
great software
Pros: smart antivirus and firewall
Cons: privacy service sucks
User Rating: 2/10
very unhappy; high maintenance
Pros: can buy anywhere
Cons: subscription verification is a constant pain
User Rating: 2/10
Horrible, look elsewhere
Pros: Virus Scanner
Cons: Everything else
My first recommendation for anyone looking to buy the McAfee product would be to check out the online tech support forum (the only free form of tech support.) Obviously, everyone complains about bad software features and you never see the positive feedback, but I think you will notice a repeating theme in tech support comments. My opinion is that there are some very serious known problems in some of the software modules and the forum does a terrible job overall of explaining some of the known bugs. If you follow through the threads, you will see multiple questions on the same problem - and rarely does someone responsible actually provide a decent answer.
As an example, somewhere along the way, we discovered that the Shredders ability to shred unused disk space and file slack was removed in an update. Now it only shreds temp Internet files, recycle bin, and browser history. To me, thats incredibly useless. Any tax or other financial info you may have had as a part of your tax program will not be shredded when you remove the tax program at the end of the year. In this case, they took AWAY a critical function we had been using up until we upgraded (it used to shred the entire hard disk.) Recently, we just added QuickClean 6 to our Internet Security Suite 7 license and its still not there. I have had similarly strange problems with Spamkiller and Privacy Service. In contrast, the Norton tools work just fine on our other machines.
I would strongly recommend avoiding the software and considering on the higher rated packages from CNET.
As you look at the user ratings for this software, you will notice they are all over the place (1-10.) I believe the reason for this is the fact that the VirusScan and Firewall portions of the Suite are actually quite good in my XP/Outlook environment, and I would recommend them without reservation. But Spamkiller, Privacy Service, Shredder, and the other packaged utilities are all very hit-and-miss in terms of performance (and really slow down the PC in many cases.) We use these peripheral functions extensively in a business environment, so perhaps many of the serious problems we encounter with them every day would not be a problem for the casual home user. In any event, save yourself some grief and just get the two good McAfee products if you must. Skip the 2005 packaged suite.
User Rating: 10/10
Crisp, Clean & Strong
Pros: Multi Tier Deffense
Cons: I found none
User Rating: 2/10
So-So with MS XP Media Center Operating System because of unresolved compatability issues.
Pros: It is "a free trial"
Cons: Not fully compatable with MS XP Media Center Operating System
User Rating: 3/10
Avoid! Bad product, bad service
Pros: It may work for you?
Cons: Ineffective, Various Schemes to get you to pay more $
They try to sell you a whole suite of products instead of making one good one so when you have a problem they can say "Oh, well you need to buy a different McAfee product to fight that, Virus Scan doesn't fight trojans!" Then when they admit that, yes, their product should protect you against that threat, you can only get help on thier message board (hey just wait and see if someone responds while your computer is useless because they sell an ineffective product!) or pay more money to talk to someone who may or may not help you. I hope your problem happens in the first 30 days, then you can get a refund. After that and they don't care what happens to you, they will not give even a partial refund to dissatisfied customers.
It was a really bad experience.
User Rating: 
8/10
It is great protechs from viruses spyware a firewall spamkiller!
Pros: kills viruses, spyware, lt has a firewall, spam killer! and popup killer
Cons: takes up lots of ram!
User Rating: 1/10
McAfee is crap. Don't ever buy anything from them. Period.
Pros: It's cheap, lets you update your definitions indefinitely, free online chat support
Cons: The buggiest software ever written; you're just asking for it to make you format your hard drive.
Finally, an attempt to uninstall it from Safe Mode left tons of files and junk registry settings all over the place, which happened to (magically) prevent the installation of Norton AV, and required an hour-long marathon session of searching for obscure registry entries and files to delete (they thought that making a proper uninstall "tool" would just be too nice, apparently).... On the whole, I estimate I have wasted a good 30+ hours of my life trying to make this software work properly and have needed around 10 different online chat sessions, each of which provided some insight but never attacked the heart of the problem, which is that the software was vomit packaged in a pretty red box.
While I have never used version 9.0 (2005), judging from other users' comments the quality of McAfee's software is just as low as ever. I have switched to Norton, and while it's annoying having to pay for a yearly update, it does its job and updates itself flawlessly, it's possible to find cheap deals on it, too, and it sure beats having a broken computer. I can only conclude that people who use McAfee use it because it's cheap, but that is no excuse. Hopefully, everyone will realize that feces such as this needs to be boycotted, McAfee will go out of business, and the world will be a better place.
User Rating: 2/10
Sure - the computer is secure - it doesn't DO anything
Pros: you can turn it off easily
Cons: horrible performance
User Rating: 1/10
Worst software ever, since the beginning of time.
Pros: Provides lots of practice uninstalling and reinstalling the application.
Cons: Many, many, hours of online chat with "tech support".
User Rating: 1/10
Worst Security Product Ever
Pros: Cute graphics
Cons: Usesless SpamKiller
He still hasn't told us who those people are that would expect to find their emails being deleted. Certainly not me!
User Rating: 
6/10
Middle of the Road
Pros: Nice Interface; Relative Ease of Use
Cons: Outdated Virus Protection; Go*damn popups
User Rating: 9/10
A very good antivirus and firewall
Pros: Great antivirus and firewall
Cons: none for me
I think it is worth the money.
User Rating: 2/10
This software does not work as advertised
Pros: Virus checker and firewall seems to work
Cons: Privacy service is worthless, spam filter is useless
The first nightmare occured when I installed it on my win98se machine. I never could get the computer to boot up properly again, so I restored a backup and lost a considerable amount of data. I tried to get this to work for a couple weeks, and gave up. It would not work no matter what I tried. I did once get it to where it seemed to be installed, but the firewall would not allow any changes. Every time I tried to open outlook express it asked it I wanted to grant acces to the program, I answered yes, but no go. So I uninstalled the software again.
I then installed win2000 on the computer and the Mcafee software installed fairly easily. With the exception that the spamkiller keeps reporting that it needs the filters updated, and says they are updated when I do so, but will say they need updated again when I check for updates.
I found the spamkiller to be about useless to me, so it's been removed.
The privacy service has almost no usefull features. I think it would be usefull to control childrens internet access. I would like to be able to block certain web sites from being accessed, but that is not possible if the user is an administrator or adult, only "older teen" or younger settings. Also, the popup and ad blocker are ineffective to weak.
The virus scanner caught a trojan once, so I guess it actually works. I did a trend micro free scan on the computer and it found no viruses which verifies that Mcafee did not allow a virus to be present.
Another thing that does not work effectively is the uninstall program. It removes only parts of the security suite, and I found that I had to use a registry cleaner to totally remove the software and delete the left over folders from my system.
Overall I rate this software very low. The previous version was better, but still was annoying.
User Rating: 
7/10
Easy to use, effective virus protection and firewall
Pros: Firewall and Virus Scan Work Well
Cons: Privacy Service and SpyWare tools not really effective.
User Rating: 8/10
Good, reliable protection
Pros: Powerful AntiVirus, Simple yet effective firewall, very strong Anti-Spam, pretty decent privacy protection
Cons: A few minor drawbacks, rare glitches mainly on Win9x based systems
The AntiVirus, which is the best part of the program, deserves much more credit than given. First of all, before I installed MIS, I had tried trial versions of other AntiVirus software and they said the computer was clean. After I installed MIS and ran a scan for viruses, it found a trojan horse that all the others seemed to have missed. Oops. A family member of mine was running a computer with no virus protection, and tried Panda, and Panda found no viruses. Then she tried MIS, without even updating it, and it being a more than a few months old, it found a virus panda missed and cleaned it. Stories I have of how VirusScan has found viruses that other programs missed could go on and on. It seems everything else I try will basicaly protect you from all the generic and In The Wild viruses such as Mydoom with a few of the minor less known ones here and there, but for generic viruses and ITW Viruses, AND a much better deal of the small fries that other products seem to miss, VirusScan does the job.
I have tried various firewalls, and like ZoneAlarm the best, but McAfee Personal Firewall Plus comes darn close. I found Personal Firewall Plus to be extreamly easy to use and navigate. I also like how it automaticaly sends reports of attacks. I also found the visual trace program to work quite well, and it helped me to find out where my attackers were coming from. The feature to Ban and Trust certain IP adresses is also very handy.
SpamKiller was just a tad more complicated than I expected but once I figured it out I found it to be extreamly effective at catching junk mail.
Privacy service was very good, the pop-up and ad-blocker could use a little more bang. As for basic privacy protection, such as protection of names, adresses and such, was good. And the parental controls were perhaps a bit too paranoid, and my younger brother had difficulty accessing websites that we both knew were fine to visit.
I've seen a few glitches with McAfee on Windows 98 systems, where as a few script errors have occured, but then again, pretty much every program I've installed and run on a Windows 9x system has either had a script error or an annoying ''Illegal Operation'' error. It's the operating system more than anything.
I use McAfee, my father uses McAfee, my bank uses McAfee (enterprise edition), my friend uses McAfee, and technicians even recomended my friend to remove other antivirus software and told him to install McAfee, and niether of us have had a problem with it.
Overall this is a good choice for securing your computer, it has a few cons here and there, but so does everything. I give McAfee Internet Security 2005 an 8.0 for exellent virus protection, a good medium-duty firewall, exellent Anti-Spam protection, and decent privacy protection.
User Rating: 1/10
Never worked
Pros: None appreciated
Cons: One flaw - computer crashed and the software did not work!
I called McAfee - except there is absolutely NO way to get phone support. So I moved to internet based chat on a support site. I connected with a non-English speaking "helper" who gave me completely irrelevant information via email two days later, and never responded to further requests for help. I finally gave up on this, of course, just a few days too late to return it to the store for a refund.
This is without a doubt the worst software package I have ever worked with and I failed to get it to work AT ALL. I am moderately facile with computers, but was unable to find adequate workarounds to make it work. The worst problem is the phony support - this company is going to go down the tubes if it keeps this up.
User Rating: 1/10
I Will Never Buy a McAfee Product Again - Ever!
Pros: Virus Scan and Personal FireWall are fine
Cons: SpamKiller permantently blocks valid emails - see below
Up until this time - I have been very pleased with their product.
All this changed when I recently upgraded to McAfee Internet Security 2005 - I recently purchased a new computer and upgraded to DSL. Even though I owned the latest version of Virus Scan and FireWall - I thought best to buy McAfee's Internet Security Suite.
What a mistake.
It seems that there is a critical bug in SpamKiller. SpamKiller captures legitimate emails and does not pass them to Outlook,
This is a very tricky bug because it does not block 100% of the emails - so a user will not immediately realize that there is a problem.
I estimate about 30% of all emails sent to me never made it to outlook.
For me this problem went on for a couple of weeks - I initially attributed it to a new email address.
However, after checking with my DSL provider, I went to McAfee's website.
Buried deep inside the bowels of the website in the SpamKiller forum, I discovered that this is a known bug and that it has been a problem for at least 4 months.
Fortunately, the dropped emails are visible in SpamKiller - you cannot print them - you cannot not move them - they are difficult to copy and save - but you can read them.
You can only imagine how horrified I was to discover several critical business emails that I had not received.
This is a terribly disappointing experience.
To resolve the problem - I removed SpamKiller
A software bug this critical requires immediate resolution by McAfee - whatever their reason - they have not fixed it.
Worse, they have done nothing to warn users.
User Rating: 
4/10
Spamkiller causes Outlook 2002 to hang, lots of popups
Pros: Inexpensive, Fixed problem in 2004 Privacy services that was causing Firefox to hang during large file downloads.
Cons: Does not work as a complete package. Spamkiller does not work with Outlook 2002. Privacy Services no longer prevents popups.
User Rating: 9/10
I have not had any problems with this program
Pros: It has worked as advertised no problems. Easy to use,I think it is fine.
Cons: none that I can see or find
User Rating: 4/10
Decent Product, excruciatingly inept, yet expensive phone support.
Pros: Doesn't bog down system, Fairly easy to use.
Cons: Poor phone sport and corporate structure (management) is firewalled better that any PC I've ever seen.
User Rating: 3/10
McAfee DID NOT WORK!!!
Pros: NICE RED BOX
Cons: SLOW'S DOWN YOUR COMPUTER AND DOESN'T CLEAN ALL VIRUSES
User Rating: 3/10
Slows down you system. Period.
Pros: Nice interface
Cons: Really slows down EVERYTHING in your system.
User Rating: 
5/10
Great if you have 16 hours to install it.
Pros: Works well on my dell
Cons: Installation and tech support stink
User Rating: 3/10
Virus protection NOT up to date
Pros: The user interface in general ease of use are just fine, I don't fault McAfee on that count.
Cons: Virus protection can be out of date by as much as a week.
Well, it took quite some time to get to the bottom of things, but it turns out this is not a bug but a pheature!
McAfee shortchanges its retail customers in that it doesn't provide the most up-to-date virus protection at its disposal. How? The boxed version of VirusScan will download a new DAT file once a week, only. Corporate subscribers receive DAT updates whenever they occur.
I'm at a loss to understand the logic, if any, behind this policy. Are home computers or small office computers in need of less protection from viruses than corporate computers? If anything, the typical home computer is probably more in need of virus protection in the typical corporate computer.
I don't think you'll find McAfee touting the benefits of "pretty much up-to-date virus protection" anytime soon. As a matter of fact, their own marketing material on their web site advises, "Never go online without the latest anti-virus protection." Too bad that to McAfee "latest" means "sometime within the last seven days".
A former McAfee customer.
User Rating: 2/10
Annoying pop-ups
Pros: does notice some virus
Cons: annoying pop-ups you can not shut off
User Rating: 9/10
It cleaned up my notebook with ease.
Pros: Simple to use
Cons: No spyware,that would make it perfect.
