McAfee Internet Security Suite 2007 comprises eight pieces of security software, designed to protect your PC from web threats. As well as anti-virus (AV) protection, it includes anti-spyware, firewall, anti-spam, parental control, file backup and restore, identity protection and registry cleaning.
Installation is relatively straightforward, though an account has to be created with McAfee your PC will need to be restarted a couple of times. Most of the default settings are sensible, except the virus scan, which happens at 4am every Friday – not good if you turn your PC off overnight. This can be changed, though.
Internet Security 2007 is effective in protecting a PC from a variety of attacks and downloads update from the internet every day. Although the interface has been refreshed, the underlying anti-virus and anti-spyware engine appears much the same as before.
The main problem with the suite is that it takes a lot of system resources and can slow a computer down. We tested it with an Athlon XP 2600+ processor and 512Mb of memory; not cutting edge, but a good computer by today's standards and representative of the kind of home computers around today.
On starting up for the first time, McAfee analysed all our existing Outlook emails – all 2,000 of them – which took over two and a half hours. Fair enough, it's a one-off task and you can leave it overnight, but it also takes around a minute to process each incoming email. A typical day’s haul in a busy office can take over an hour in download time, though typically much less in the home.
Surfing web pages in Internet Explorer 7, which used to appear almost instantaneously, took up to half a minute to build, on-screen. We tried turning off McAfee Site Advisor, the bonus feature which rates sites for viruses, spyware and phishing, but it made little speed improvement.
McAfee’s technical support claimed there could be conflicts between its own AV checks and those of some ISPs, which may cause slow running. If so, we would expect the company to liaise with the major ISPs to resolve the issues. When we removed the suite, both email reception and internet browsing speeds returned to normal.
McAfee Internet Security 2007 may have all the bells and whistles, but unless our experience was atypical, it’s probably only suitable for the latest, fastest PCs.
Also consider:
Grisoft AVG Internet Security
Full internet security package from Grisoft
Panda Internet Security 2007
Complete but idiosyncratic security software
Tesco Internet Security
The supermarket giant’s budget security package helps to protect against a wide
range of threats
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