Product Reviews

One of the biggest bugbears with keeping on top of the sheer volume of viruses, trojans, worms and other nasties is simply dealing with the equally large volume of anti-virus software identity updates and signature file downloads. But given that a common form of attack involves using your address book contacts and bandwidth to attack others, you can't afford to ignore the damage they can do - not just to your system but also to your reputation.

A fire-and-forget solution isn't ideal, because you need to know that your anti-virus protection is active and working, rather than just assuming it is. Yet you don't want to be bothered with continual alerts every time the latest bucket-load of infected spam drops through your virtual letterbox. Getting the balance just right is nigh-on impossible, but we think McAfee has neared it with VirusScan 8. The interface is simple to use and the configuration options are kept to a sensible minimum; too much control can be worse than too little, as it can be all too easy to inadvertently weaken your defences. But there's still room for the more experienced to access some advanced features.

Some people aren't keen on the integrated Security Suite style interface, of which VirusScan is just one module. However, if you don't use the McAfee firewall, privacy or spam solutions, you can safely just ignore those extra buttons.

We found no conflicts with the myriad of different firewall, spyware and privacy-protection applications on our various test PCs. To say we were impressed is an understatement; we even managed to get McAfee and ZoneAlarm living together, although the ZoneAlarm anti-virus component did need to be disabled.

McAfee handles downloading and installation of updates to both software and virus signatures in the background, notifying the user when they've been successfully installed. If you prefer, you can change this to asking before installation, downloading or both. Similarly, you can decide upon the level of alerts that are brought to your attention.

We

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liked the new spyware and Internet dialler protection, which operates in a similar way to dedicated spyware scanners, detecting and deleting any nefarious agents. We were also impressed with the WormStopper. This has been noticeably tweaked and now works very well, detecting behaviour such as bulk mailing, delivery of multiple messages within a few seconds and so on. This is effective technology, and will even help to catch nefarious activity before a signature file has been made available. You can configure the WormStopper in the advanced options section, so as to fit into your normal usage patterns - a nice touch to help prevent false alarms and a subsequent lack of faith. Mailing list owners will certainly need to do some tweaking, as the defaults are set to flag warnings at thresholds of sending the same mail to more than 40 recipients, and more than five messages outbound in under 30 seconds.

As an added layer of protection, VirusScan also has ScriptStopper, which alerts you to the script-driven activity of many threats, stopping actions initiated without your knowledge. Similarly, email scanning within Outlook is much improved, and now provides a first line of defence against inbound threats in most popular clients. This includes Outlook Express, Eudora and Pegasus - in fact, any standard POP3/SMTP clients - but not Hotmail. The Instant Messaging scanner has also been improved and now scans outbound as well as the previous inbound messages, and supports Microsoft Messenger 3.6 onwards, Yahoo! IM 4.1 onwards, AIM 2.1 onwards and MSN Messenger 6 onwards.

Everything else remains pretty much as was, which is no bad thing. You get heuristic scanning to recognise unknown virus activity, the ability to look inside compressed folders for infection, and automatic downloads of updated identity files before performing the initial scan. Additional features such as QuickClean Lite for reclaiming disk space, secure data shredding and the graphical virus map of the world are more eye candy than anything, but, since they cost nothing, we can't complain.

Across our test machines, we also found McAfee VirusScan Professional to be less intrusive on system resources than its principle competitor, Norton AntiVirus, although there wasn't a huge amount in it.

Even at the McAfee's own pricing of £45 for a two-user licence, which is the default for the professional product, VirusScan offers excellent value for money. But it's possible to find it for just £25, which is exceptional. For this reason, and the improved form and features of VirusScan 8, it manages to knock Norton off the A List.