Customer Reviews

McAfee Total Protection 3 User 2010 [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(93)
4 star:		(51)
3 star:		(27)
2 star:		(18)
1 star:		(61)

 

 

The McAfee product allowed my computer to become infected with Antivirus System Pro, a virus that almost disables its host. A scan of my hard drive using McAfee antivirus failed to find the spyware. I went to McAfee Customer Support online chat. I chatted with someone in India. At his request, I provided details about my system and described the problem. He could not help, but suggested that I contact paid Technical Support. He said that they could remotely take control of my computer and remove the spyware. The charge is $89.95, guaranteed.

I declined the offer. I used Windows XP to restore my computer to the state that it had been the day before the infection. It took me about 15 minutes and removed the spyware completely.

I purchased the McAfee internet firewall and virus protection to prevent infections like this one. When the McAfee program failed, Customer Support would have had me pay $89.95 to remove the virus. No wonder the price of McAfee has come down so dramatically this year. They have a new unseen and unexpected revenue source. They just need to reel you in with the new low price and then stick you with the additional price of Customer Support.

McAfee has offered an impressive suite of utilities and products. For the past four years I have been using Norton 360. Unfortunately, I still had a virus get past their software and ruin my hard drive. Norton wanted $100 to fix the problem.

So I switched to McAfee. I live in Korea, and today it caught the Conflicker virus attempting to jump onto my computer the instant I plugged in a thumb drive. Now that's quick!

McAfee also works silently in the background to ensure optimal performance. Unlike Norton that would take me hours to set up rules and schedules, McAfee efficiently runs on auto pilot. Norton sounds bells and whistles when it finds an virus, but McAfee effectively erases them without all the excitement and alarm(take for example the way Norton lists every cookie as a potential security threat- that's hardly the case).

Finally, McAfee's managment center is simple and easy to use. If you run a business, McAfee easily integrates all your computers and firewalls. This makes your business networking easy, safe, and effective. The savings of this feature alone is worth $1000s compared to having to have someone do it for you.

Did I mention that it costs about half of what Norton's 360 does. All in all, I believe that McAfee is superior product.

This is a horrible, horrible product. First, McAffee permitted my computer to get THREE viruses that it failed to catch even after 3 scans. Not only did the viruses (a trojan connected to "Internet Seucuryt 2010' among them) nearly crash my hard drive, but I had to PAY "customer service" to tell me it could not help beause their scan found nothing amiss. It took a Bestt Buy scan to uncover the 3 viruses, and, at $199 to fix, which McAffee refused to pay, I had to buy a new computer. Suffice it to say, I will NOT be installing McAffee on it.

McAfee Total Protection is a Total Resource Pig!!! I'm extremely disappointed because you'd think that as widely-used as McAfee is, that they could create a product that did not slow your computer down to a crawl. As another reviewer had noted, when it automatically updates or starts to scan, it can tie up your PC for several minutes, during which time I often find it impossible to do anything else on my PC. In fact, it's such a resource hog that sometimes I can't even click open McAfee to stop the scan! This is indeed unfortunate because we use McAfee at work and the network version works fine. Maybe if I had 3 or 4 GBs of RAM, it wouldn't be such a problem ... but why should I have to upgrade my RAM just to accomodate an antivirus program? I previously have used ESET NOD32, and when it ran in the background, it was really fast and didn't slow down performance at all! I guess I got suckered by the cheap deal McAfee offered, but I'm getting rid of it as soon as I can.

McAfee was a waste of money and especially time for us. Our computer supposedly protected by McAfee continually allows fake security alerts (Your computer has been infected...) to pop up on our computer while surfing the net and does not block down loads from such sites. The scan was of no use as it did not detect anything wrong though our computer kept getting slower and slower. Just recently we end up with the "Google Redirect Virus" every time we would try to go to a website from Google or any other search engines some other website would open instead of the one we were trying for. If we tried to go to any security or anit-virus web sites it would block them out totaly. A friend suggested I run "SpyBot Search & Destroy" a free program. I loaded it and ran its scan. WOW it found 114 different malware and spyware programs running in our computer. It removed them! Our computer is so damn fast now. That did not get rid of the Google, Yahoo, Bing search engine redirect problem. I forgot to mention this virus or what ever the heck it is will also screw up the "System Restore" on Windows XP not allowing this function to work. Now I down load HITMAN PRO 3.5 from CNET also free. I run its scan. Hitman only finds one problem but that one problem is the thing that has been driving us crazy for the past two weeks trying to get rid of it. McAfee was USELESS!!! It did not block it, it did not detect it, nor could it remove it. What the heck do we pay a annually fee for ??? I am no computer wiz! I have a hard enough time trying to figure out how to attach a picture to an email so I sure do not need to spend count-less hours trying to get rid of spyware, malware and viruses. I thought that is what we were paying McAfee for.

I like it okay. It does work and stop viruses. But, I'd recommend the cheaper version, McAfee AntiVirus Plus 3User 2010, without the additional features. They don't seem to do all that much.

Pros:
+Doesn't install quite as many monitoring devices or slow down your computer as much as Norton Internet Security 2010 1-User/3PC or other anti-virus programs
+Has a nice archiving utility
+Three-user license, I tested on two different computers
+Has handy shortcuts to things like Disk Defragmenter

Cons:
-"Parental Controls" really doesn't do anything, and would take hours to set up
-"Identity Protection" gives really annoying pop-ups and doesn't seem to work 100% of the time
-Takes over an hour to install
-No way to manage licenses on the internet, such as if you want to "deactivate" a computer
-Beware if you let the subscription expire, product can stop working, and I'm not talking about just new virus definition updates
-Mediocre customer service
-Doesn't block very many "bad sites," with SiteAdvisor. Also, you have to turn on an annoying toolbar, or it won't work.
-Tries to download everything off the internet instead of using the disk, but you can skip this and use the disk

A year ago, I had a bad experience with McAfee, bought the product, but couldn't install it, because I had the Virtumonde virus, or Vundo, and it stopped me from installing any McAfee products, and McAfee customer support was horrible. I got mad, gave up, got a refund, and switched to PC Tools Spyware Doctor + Antivirus 2009 Version 6.0 instead. I realized McAfee isn't that bad, once you get the viruses off your system, so I'm switching back.

I got this back in September and have the software on a weekly update schedule. Since then I have gotten 1 virus and 1 spyware infection even with all the silly options turned on like internet surfing, email protection etc.

Both times, McAfee didn't find the infections nor clean them, even with a virus definition update of the day I got infected. I had to remove them both manually with instructions from the internet. (Luckly I have the knowledge and another computer from which to do this, not everyone does.)

When I called support to ask them why the software didn't find the virus and ask for a refund, they tried to sell me a special virus removal help call for $90. I asked why was I paying for the protection subscription then? The answer was even computers with virus protection get infected. Great stuff, I have the chat log.

Anyway, when the program is not not finding viruses it constantly dings and dongs, wanting you to "verify your subscription." I paid for this, why do I need to verify 3 or 4 times a week? Especially for something that doesn't really work?

All in all a very poor program and a poor experience. Highly recommend you do NOT PURCHASE.

I have five computers and they were all running on different Anti-Virus programs because they all came installed with them from the factory.

Now after dealing with PC-cillin,Norton & McAfee over the past several years,I've eliminated everything but the one without the headaches and that's McAfee.

I started several years ago with McAfee on my main computer and last year I got the 3 user for several of my other computers because I liked the way the well named Total Protection worked and now with the Total Protection 2010 I'm covered on all my computers.

With the PC-cillin & Norton I dealt with viruses that shut my life down,dealing on the phone and on the web with both companies and it was a nightmare.

Using McAfee I have had NO nightmares and the SiteAdvisor gives me the Head's Up if I'm on a possibly bad website and I'm happy to say I've had no problems since switching to McAfee.

From here on out I'm sticking with McAfee

I have been a user of McAfee for years, and my current subscription is valid until 9/21/10. Yesterday my automatic update on my 2009 version of McAfee Total Protection automatically downloaded and installed the 2010 version. It installed correctly, however, the real time scanning (a feature that is also available in my old 2009 version) was disabled and couldn't be turned on. The panel also said that my subscription expired on 9/21/09. A quick visit to my account at McAfee confirmed that my subscription was still valid and wouldn't expire until 9/21/10. So, I downloaded the program again and reinstalled. The problem persisted. Then I called customer service in India and got transfered to another tech support guy from India. He did a remote access, uninstalled the program then reinstalled it. Before the installation was completed, he logged off by saying that everything would be fine. Of course the computer froze up after he hang up and I had to do hard shut down. I knew this would happen since I did the exact same steps yesterday, but I couldn't keep him on the line. The customer service center in India now suggested that I should pay $90 for a new tech support. I can easily buy a Norton and be done with this inferior product. You will not be able to even connect to a supposedly Free Chat with customer support. Worthless product, worthless customer support. Don't buy this, buy Norton instead

The only reason I give this one star is I can't give it zero.

I installed this on all three computers I own, 3 weeks ago. Yesterday one of those computers got badly slammed by a worm that appears to be able to infect the security software. Lucky me, I have a neighbor who makes his living fixing infected computers. We hadn't "talked shop" before but while he spent three hours cleaning my computer he told me that he's been having similar problems with McAfee "protected" computers for a while. I checked out their user forum looking for help. What I found was a report of a problem 21 months ago that sounds possibly related--and according to a post from yesterday it's STILL NOT FIXED!

So my neighbor got my computer "clean" he thought, but all I had to do was let it run for another 24 hours and suddenly McAfee is all hosed up again and taking the rest of the machine with it.

They haven't responded to my support request yet; but from the forum their answer is likely to be for me to pay them $90 to "fix" my PC for the problem I purchased this software to AVOID.

One important advice my virus-fixing neighbor gave me I'll pass along is to avoid "big name" security software--the virus writers have started to target the security software itself, and by targeting the most popular brands they maximize the damage they can do.

So far, Total Protection is a Total Failure for me.