Product Reviews

The first question to greet the annual increments of security suites is whether there's actually anything new behind those marginally shinier interfaces. And certainly, existing users of McAfee Internet Security Suite 2005 may be disappointed by the lack of new features here. But the devil is in the detail of improved day-to-day use. This includes more frequent (daily) automated anti-virus signature updates; a new gaming mode to suppress unwanted pop-ups from the firewall; the ability to enable application access for a current session only; an anti-phishing plug-in to block ID-theft sites; and performance tweaks to reduce the impact upon system performance while improving scanning times.

Although we were rather surprised to see that AntiSpyware 2006 isn't included in the security suite package, our fears of McAfee dropping the ball were allayed by the fact that VirusScan 2006 has spyware well covered. It refers to this type of software as a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP), and these can be scanned for in tandem with a full virus scan, or separately. Unfortunately, despite the technical tweaks, McAfee remains slow: a standalone PUP scan on our testbed PC took nine minutes, 38 seconds - slow enough to place it one off the bottom in our recent anti-spyware group test. However, the quality of scanning was good: using the same Labs testbed and methodology, it detected 66 per cent, removed 71 per cent and blocked 55 per cent of the spyware installed - enough to earn it a respectable joint-fourth place.

It isn't entirely comprehensive, though: unlike the standalone McAfee AntiSpyware product, this integrated version doesn't monitor suspicious changes to your system once they're made - modified browser settings, system files, search page, homepage hijacking and so on will go unnoticed. This means you either need to spend £30 on the standalone product or, better still, buy Spy Doctor for £23 instead.

VirusScan 2006 remains as impressive as ever. It's slow, but 100 per cent dependable. The ScriptStopper and WormStopper functions have now been copied by the competition, but McAfee pioneered these techniques and their application is faultless here.

The same can be said of the Privacy Service, which bundles the same features as the ID Lock, Privacy and Parental Control functions in ZoneAlarm Security Suite within

The suite's weak link, though, is SpamKiller, which heavily affected mail download speeds, especially when faced with a large incoming POP3 load. The initial spam detection rate of 86 per cent was fine, thanks to the barrage of filtering applied, which includes meta-character, invisible text, too many images and intentional misspelling. The false positive rate of 11 per cent wasn't as impressive, though, much for the same reasons. A 'friends' list composed of imported contacts and then improved by use of an 'add friends' button will help over time, but the lack of a corresponding address-based blacklist is an unusual oversight. Indeed, unlike ZoneAlarm/MailFrontier, there's no simple way to block an address or domain. On the positive side, it filters POP3 mail irrespective of client, handles MSN/Hotmail with equal skill, as it does IMAP and Exchange accounts under Outlook.

The personal firewall module was pretty much fire and forget, thanks to the excellent internal database of known 'good' applications, totalling some 4,000, that automatically configures the firewall on-the-fly. For those applications and processes not recognised by McAfee, the prompts are both simple and informative, with good guidance and plentiful options. The Track and Trace function will please those of us who like playing the real-world game of 'hunt the hacker'. Although the world map that plots the location of the 'attack' source by plotting WHOIS data is pure eye candy, the addition of both registrant and network views make this a handy tool. Similarly, the ability to quickly and simply expose service ports when needed, usually an option buried deep in the configuration detail, makes this an easy-to-use checkbox-driven option instead. Unlike ZoneAlarm, however, there's no ability to automatically recognise a new network and pop-up configuration dialogs, instead requiring the user to add a separate firewall rule for each network.

The McAfee value proposition is a good one: the individual modules add up to £130 inc VAT and the new 'wireless home network edition' includes a three-user licence for £100 inc VAT, making it even better. However, there's no denying that ZoneAlarm performs better for the same price.