Despite the interface redesign, the McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007 feels like a grab bag of security and system performance tools. It'll keep your PC safe, but we think there are other products on the market that do so with greater ease.
McAfee's Internet Security Suite 2007 is what the vendor calls its "eight products in one" application. Included are antivirus, antispyware, antispam, antiphishing, and firewall protection; PC performance enhancement; and parental controls. There's also a special rootkit-detection scanner known as McAfee X-ray for Windows. But McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007 doesn't play well with other security applications you might already have installed, including third-party antispyware apps, and it continues to hog more resources than Norton Internet Security. Our real problem with McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007, however, isn't its security, it's its overall ease of use: despite a major interface redesign, McAfee fails to balance having the right tools with making them accessible. Thus, we recommend ZoneAlarm Internet Security 7 over McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007; the ZoneAlarm package is a much lighter, better balanced security suite.
Setup and installation
We installed McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007 directly from the Internet. The updated McAfee Internet Suite sells for AU$99.95, matching Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2007 pricing.
McAfee uses the intermediary Download Center, which you must first download to access the final application. McAfee defends this two-step choice saying that it can better update the content on its back end, which is true. However, other vendors download a version of the application first, then query the vendor for any new updates. Either way, you get the latest version, but we prefer to have the application protect us ASAP, then update.
Unfortunately, our copy of McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007 stopped installing when it detected another installed security product. Unlike Norton, which allowed us to keep the free copy of ZoneAlarm installed and running, McAfee demanded that ZoneAlarm be uninstalled first. Rather than give us a chance to do so, McAfee automatically rolled back the current install, and we lost about 20 minutes. Once ZoneAlarm was removed, we performed the McAfee installation a second time without a glitch. It would have been nice if McAfee had scanned our machine first and informed us of any known conflicts before it initiated the installation. After our second, successful installation, we rebooted.
The interface for all of McAfee's security products has been simplified and standardised. This is good if you plan to purchase other McAfee offerings. Last year, the McAfee Security Center was a separate window, an annoying feature if you were inside the antivirus part and wanted to access to the firewall part. This year, everything is integrated in one window through a left-hand navigation system. McAfee offers one table of contents for common tasks and another table of contents intended for advanced users. We think one table of contents would have worked better, with an option to drill down within a topic for more advanced users.
Should you want to remove McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007, you'll find there is no uninstall icon within Windows XP All Programs, so you'll have to use Windows Control Panel's "Add and remove programs." Even after selecting the McAfee suite for install, you'll still need to check each application you want removed; there are seven in McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007, so don't miss one. After the program's uninstall and reboot process completed, we found only a handful of system registry entries but no leftover files within system folders, which we did encounter with Trend Micro. Of the Internet security suites we reviewed this year, only ZoneAlarm Internet Security offers clean uninstallations.
Features
McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007 includes backup-and-recovery and system-maintenance features not found in other security suites we've seen. But there's also superfluous eye candy, such as the Virus Map feature. Yes, there are a lot of features, but not all of them are meaningful or unique to McAfee.
We like the backup-and-recovery system built into McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007; none of the other Internet security suites we've reviewed have offered this. McAfee offers a choice, letting you burn the backup to a disc or save to another drive volume or to a network. We think this feature is a definite plus, as part of security is having a good backup ready in case disaster strikes. And as you configure the system for scheduled antivirus scans, you can configure it to perform scheduled backups, as well.
The Maintain Computer feature is another good idea that could stand to have more McAfee-specific tools in the future. McAfee QuickClean clears cookies and junk from your Internet browsers and removes deleted applications from the system registry. It is no longer available as a stand-alone application and finds a new home here. However, the other two items on the computer maintenance page are Windows utilities that are already available within Windows XP, Disk Defragmenter and Task Scheduler, both of which you can run for free from the Start menu in Windows. On a separate page, under Advanced, is the McAfee Shredder, a valuable security feature for writing over deleted files with 1s and 0s to ensure that no one can read what you've deleted. Here, too, there are free options are available, including Eraser, but it's nice to see the feature included within the suite. In the future, we'd like to see the Maintain Computer feature dispense with the Windows apps and combine the McAfee-specific QuickClean and Shredder on one page.
The traffic monitor, a visual interpretation of your firewall activity, is valuable, as are the virus information library and HackerWatch, McAfee's site that logs recent Internet attacks. However, some of the other features are of questionable security value. The Virus Map is superfluous. It's a real-time map showing where virus outbreaks are occurring, according to McAfee. And McAfee Visual Tracer is a Traceroute-like application with a map of the world so that you can see who it is that's attacking you (although the end point isn't necessarily the origin of the attack, just the last hop that's traceable through McAfee's servers).
Not only does it "clean" those files mentioned, it totally wipes out your "Sent" folder. So if you archive there for job tracking purposes, forget it. Because it also wipes out ALL of your restore points on XP! So no way to recover what it destroys. Even their own technicians don't seem to be aware of this.