Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Works, but is difficult to use and is restrictive, November 1, 2004
I bought this software to install on an older AMD athelon Windows XP machine instead of renewing my expired Norton subscription. My other PC has the latest Norton software installed. I wanted to see what the real differences are between these two companies. They both work equally well and I have had no problems with either causing my machines to run slow. I like some of the features offered in this package, such as the ability to track an attack using traceroute. However, I find it difficult to get to some of these features and the pop up blocker is overly restrictive. I have to manually add web sites that I want to allow pop ups (including opening a new browser window). I have to search hard for the option to exclude pop up web sites from the filter list as it is burried deep in the options. Other times I've had to disable the privacy software to get work done on a few web sites for similar reasons as well. I find it odd that I have to enter two passwords to enable the privacy features once they have been disabled. These are nitpicks though. The software works and give me really good control over what I allow onto my machine, if not too much control. My preference and recommendation to friends is to choose Norton. I find it much easier to work with. Mcafee did not pass my user friendly test for people who are not computer experts. This is why I give 3 stars for the software.
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31 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful user interface; Plagued with incompatibility probs, January 26, 2005
In this day and age, we all need a little more security, especially online. A typical computer user, whether using dial-up or especially an always-on direct internet connection, should have antivirus software, spyware protection and firewall defense at a bare minimum. For those who enjoy the perks of online banking and commerce, it would be nice to have some kind of privacy protection. And anyone who's anyone with an e-mail address has wished that SOMETHING could be done to help protect against e-mail spam.
Enter McAfee Internet Security Suite v7.0. A free, limited-feature edition was preinstalled on my new laptop computer, so purchasing the full version from McAfee was the logical choice. Unfortunately, I must say that this software did NOT work for me.
There are some good features here: First of all, the design of the program is good. The user interface is absolutely beautiful -- easy on the eyes, and more importantly, with information, configuration options and settings controls exactly where they intuitively SHOULD be. Configuring and managing the software couldn't be easier. And the McAfee software has very nice graphical presentation of information, including bar charts and maps to show you a whole host of information. True, some of it is just eye candy. But the intuitiveness of the user interface is not to be overlooked.
But here's the catch: On my system, at least, the McAfee software would routinely freeze-up. This did not cause a whole-system freeze -- only the McAfee software would become unresponsive. Firewall would continue to run in the background, but I could not access the Security Center, VirusScan or other configuration panels when this happened. I spent an entire week with McAfee's free online Technical Support people trying to identify the etiology of the problem, to no avail. Six attempts at removing-and-reinstalling the software with different methods all failed to fix the problem.
I am convinced that the problem lies in the fact that the McAfee software (unlike other brand software, such as Norton Internet Security) spawns MANY separate processes which need to communicate to function as a whole. McAfee does this in order to allow the user to customize which components he wants to run. However, if one of these components freezes (and to the best of my investigative ability, it was always the system tray applet), the rest of the system starts to suffer. Like the cliché, if one part catches a cold, the rest will get the flu.
I cannot say that the software would cause this problem on everyone's computer. Surely, it must run on many computers..... I've had McAfee software in the past, and been very pleased. But I also know many people (myself included, as well as some of the other reviewers here, below) who have been dissatisfied this time around.
In the end, I had to totally remove the McAfee software from my system. I purchased Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2005 (ASIN B0002UCSKI), which functions perfectly. It's not as pretty or as intuitive to configure as McAfee, but it gets the job done effectively. (See my separate review of this product.)
An additional note to security-conscious consumers: It never hurts to have several layers of protection. I also run the Windows XP firewall (in addition to the Norton firewall) and Microsoft's new AntiSpyware freeware (in addition to the Norton Antivirus).
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Mixed (Mostly bad) Review, December 19, 2004
This is essentially 4 products:
VirusScan An Antivirus, A Firewall, Spamkiller an Antispam system for email and Privacy Protection.
I use Windows2000 Pro on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4
The Firewall Works very well and is easy to set up and use
The VirusScan Works very well and is easy to set up and use, though it is never clear if virus definitions are uptodate. There does not seem to be an automatic update like Symantec's
Live Update
The Privacy protection is a D I A S T E R. It keeps flashing a message that a Component is missing. If you try to disable it it disables the firewall and in spite of that ALL COMMUNICATION WITH THE INTERNET STOPS. I had to de-install the whole suite and reinstall it without Privacy Protection.
Spam killer: I do not use Outlook, but I installed Spam Killer anyway, and tried to disable it. This prevented the rest of the suite from working. So I reinstalled the whole thing again minus Spam Killer and mius Privacy Protection.
On Line Help: Touted as 24 x 7. DOES NOT WORK. I tried from 3 different computers all without Pop-Up Blockers.
CONCLUSION: SAVE YOUR MONEY AND BUY THE FIREWALL AND VIRUSSCAN SEPARATELY AND STAY AWAY FROM PRIVACY PROTECTION AND SPAMKILLER if you use internet mail like Hotmail.
My email address is eg_souaya@hotmail.com. McAfee you are welcome to contact me and help me change my mind.
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