McAfee VirusScan V8.0

Rating:
Summary: AUTO PROTECT...isn't that the purpose??
Review: I've had NAV on my past 3 home cumputer systems; never a problem. I recently bought gateway 4.1 P4 HT 1 gig memory. Very proud to have my new toy, I wanted to protect it. After the second system scan I found 2 viruses. After investigating I found the Auto Protect option was OFF. I tried every option of turning it on. IT WOULD NOT TURN ON. I contacted NAV support by email because a phone call costs AS MUCH AS A NEW ANTI-VIRUS! I was given the same step by step process that is online, which also failed to fix the problem. ITs still OFF and my subscription runs out next month. With this POOR customer support I will not update to Norton again. Vote with your dollar America!

Rating:
Summary: BUYER BEWARE
Review: If you had asked me how good this product had been for the past several years (or maybe decade), I would have rated it at 5 stars simply because I had never encountered a virus to begin with and it never game me problems conflicting with other software, UNTIL.......
I had a "worm" (Zafi) infection on 6/13/04 with an up to date engine and this peice of crap didn't pick it up. McAfee's website said one needs an engine no loder than 6/14/04!!! That's 3 days after the worm had spread and infected my system already. The worm didn't allow me to run and install an update so I used McAfee's stinger to locate and disinfect the system (for that, I'm thankful). When I attempted to reinstall Mcafee ver.8, I got the message that a newer version is installed on my system already but I can no longer locate it to delete. I went over their site and took step-by-step to manually uninstall. Did all of that and the software still wouldn't install. I contacted their chat support. A total nightmare. 2 hours chatting with tech who's probably helping (or should I say wasting other people's time) and giving me total generic answers that don't even pertain to my peoblem. That's total BS and fraud to sell software that couldn't do what it was supposed to do (i.e. protect me from a worm because their engine required to detect it was not up to date till 3 days later), then the software I paid 40$ for to last me 1 year (and only had for 3 months), I can no longer reinstall on my machine and all their tech support can do is to tell me to defrag and do clean install when I had way beoyend that to clean every trace of the old software to no avail. What a shame. Wish I was an attorney with the time needed to pursue this. I'm sure there are others like me facing this situation as I type this. For those giving this one 5 stars, wait till you get infected with a virus or a worm with an up to date engine that proves useless then try to get the software up after the worm disables it and find out you can no longer reinstall because the disk keeps seeing a ghost newer version when nothing exits and no customer support. Hope will have better luck with Norton. I'll be shopping for a new virus scan software tomorrow. Hope this helps. I'm mad.

Rating:
Summary: Stupid
Review: This program is stupid. It makes you download 5 things before you can update your definitions, along with registering. You have you remember your email and password just to update! McAfee has this stupid securitycenter... Just buy Norton. You'll smile.

Rating:
Summary: Awful, Criminal, McAfee VScan is itself a virus
Review: To me, a virus is something that you do not wish to put on your system that takes over functions and damages your computer. McAfee VirsuScan 8.0 is exactly that. Having installed (at least the install went fine) on a brand new XP platform which ran very smoothly, problems immediately came up. First, system response time dropped into the cellar, looking at task manager it seemed that the McAfee products were consuming all of my CPU cycles. More importantly, the system itself became unstable, GPU failures and spontaneous reboots.

This is the truly infuriating part. After fiddling with it for a while and receiving no help from their tech support other than 'you must have a virus already', I decided to uninstall. Following their uninstall procedures, it seemed that all was done, yet McAfee remains behing, launching a process (MCINFO.EXE) every time the system starts that requests access to the internet to download updates and sucking up CPU cycles. According to McAfee (and other concurring message boards), the only way to completely remove McAfee products is to search drives and manually delete files one by one, followed by dangerous searches and edits of the system registry.

Why a manufacturer of a software intended to protect my system from problems would create such an unstable and inherently stubborn software is truly beyond comprehension. I thoroughly encourage others to avoid this and all McAfee security products!

Rating:
Summary: Garbage
Review: With its awkward user interface and the manufacturer's repeated attempts to sell me more software when I'd use the product, this was never my favorite piece of software. Nevertheless, I decided to continue to use it after moving to a new location and changing my email address. From that point on the program refused to update the list of viruses it'd check for. Even after a two-hour Internet chat with three of their technicans, the problem went unresolved. What was a poor product from the start became an esentially useless product.