McAfee VirusScan Plus

The redesigned McAfee VirusScan Plus application has three tools for security purposes that include an anti-virus, firewall as well as anti-spyware and there are also utilities to monitor system performance. These features are adequate without being outstanding and may not quite match those of competitive anti-virus software such as Norton and Kaspersky.

You can either download McAfee VirusScan Plus from the McAfee site or purchase it in retail outlets, though be prepared to experience a bit of difficulty when it comes to setting up the application because you need to first install Download Center which will analyze your system and then you can choose which product to download. In addition, you need to have Download Center connect via the Internet for further downloading that includes individual items such as VirusScan, SiteAdvisor, Personal Firewall as well as Security Center, and it can even take you an hour to download everything.

McAfee VirusScan Plus is also resource hungry taking up seventy-five MB of space on your hard drive, though it is half of what is required when using Norton, and in the bargain McAfee VirusScan Plus runs considerably more services and agents, and takes up a huge chunk of services as compared to Norton. However, McAfee VirusScan Plus will run on XP as well as Windows 2000, as compared to just Windows XP for Norton.

To get down to the interface, there is the initial Protection Center interface that has two panes, one on the left for navigating the various tools, and the right hand pane that shows system status. While navigating with McAfee VirusScan Plus you will see a couple of tables of content with one showing basic features while the other one lists advanced tools. The best part is that the overall feel is that of a whole system and not of many stand-alone systems put together.

The Security Center that has undergone some design changes is more of an advertisement for the product, and you may find that when there is a component missing, you are connected to the online store of McAfee allowing you to purchase the missing component, rather than simply explain why the component is not there.

McAfee VirusScan Plus also has more in the form of system diagnostic tools that allow you to shred your deleted files and which even allow you to perform defragmentation of your hard drive and there are even some tools for different network monitoring, and the wonderful SiteAdvisor that is a great anti-sphishing tool.

The performance of this software is quite good and is an improvement over previous versions cutting down drastically on processing times for scanning files, and so McAfee VirusScan Plus should be given above average rating.