McAfee VirusScan AntiVirus

McAfee VirusScan is one of the best known and market leading AntiVirus products on the market today. McAfee came to prominence with a virus-killer, but has matured to offer an all-around safeguard, including firewall protection, data security and more.

If you are looking for one of the latest AntiVirus protection software programs and you prefer McAfee as one of the oldest and most trusted providers, you should explore McAfee VirusScan Plus with Site Advisor. This includes support for virus and spyware scanning, as well as including McAfee SiteAdvisor which adds safety ratings to websites and McAfee's personal firewall, protecting your PC from outside attacks.

McAfee VirusScan is a "best-of-breed" product and certainly a sound choice. At $39.99 for a 1 year licence it is not the cheapest, and McAfee do not offer a multi-year discount. However, if you are looking to protect multiple computers each additional licence costs only $10.00.

McAfee VirusScan is one of a suite of offerings from McAfee including McAfee Internet Security Suite and McAfee Total Protection. If you do have other McAfee products installed or are using its Internet Security suite, great strides have been made to ensure that the interface is the same throughout all the different sections.

Like all good virus scanners, McAfee VirusScan automatically downloads updated virus definitions from the Internet on a regular basis. Staying up to date will dramatically decrease any possibility that a virus will infect your computer. On Average, McAfee comes out with new virus definitions on a daily basis. however, you do need to keep your licence up to date to access this service.

McAfee VirusScan automatically scans all incoming and outgoing mail, so you won't need to remember to perform this task on incoming mail, and you won't have to worry about your outgoing mail inadvertently spreading viruses to family and friends. It also automatically scans files you download from the Internet, email attachments, and files you send or receive via instant messaging software.

VirusScan also polls Microsoft directly to learn about the latest Windows vulnerabilities and checks your system to see if you're patched against them. We also liked the link to McAfee's site that lets you determine if a given virus threat is real or a hoax.

In AV-test.org's most recent testing of the AntiVirus packages on the market McAfee VirusScan fared reasonably well coming in around a third of the way down the pack. Positives highlighted in the results were real time adware/spyware detection, accuracy (no false positives were reported) and cleaning. However, the test results did show that McAfee VirusScan was one of the slower products on the market with scan times over 4 hours, compared to less than 2 hours for the fastest packages on the market.

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.

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