McAfee Virus Scan 2008 Plus

Many of improvements within McAfee VirusScan Plus 2008 are in the code, which is where you want them to be. McAfee has gone ahead with a silly marketing campaign emphasizing that it alone will protect your desktop, protect your Web browsing with Site Advisor, and will also protect your mobile phone for one price. Which makes us suspicious--why tack on the extras? Two of three "triple play" protections were actually offered last year, and, at the time of this writing, the mobile component still wasn't available for testing. Instead of repackaging itself, McAfee should have pared down the system resources it uses, enhanced its firewall more, tweaked last year's interface, and switched to a more streamlined download and installation process. As it stands Mcafee VirusScan 2008 looks and feels like warmed-over last year's product, with too few "must haves." Bottom line, for solid, award-winning antivirus protection, without the gimmicks and the ever present up sale to more expensive suites, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2008 remains our Editors' Choice for 2007.

Features
McAfee bills VirusScan Plus 2008 as its six-in-one security solution. Included within are many interesting tools such as the system diagnostic tools to shred deleted files and defragment your hard drive; various network monitoring tools; and McAfee's own antisphishing tool, SiteAdvisor. Although SiteAdvisor was included last year, it lacked the antiphishing component. and more.

Performance
McAfee VirusScan Plus stays in the middle of the pack, sometimes trending toward the upper end of the middle. On our iTunes test, VirusScan Plus placed solidly in the middle of the pack at 271 seconds. In our Microsoft Office test, VirusScan Plus trended toward the high end, taking home the second-longest score at 1,519 seconds. In a test scanning a single folder with compressed and media files, McAfee scored 446 seconds, again, toward the high end of our middle group. And in terms of boot speed, McAfee was third-longest at 38 seconds. To find out how we test antivirus software.

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