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McAfee
Internet Security Suite 2006
McAfee is a trusted name
when it comes to some of the best protection that can be offered to pc
users. Bringing together a suite of the best known names in protection
being VirusScan, Personal Firewall Plus, SpamKiller and Privacy Service,
Internet Security Suite will take care of most home user internet
protection needs.
You know that it actually sucks that we even need
these products. Idiocy and identity theft is so prevalent on the
internet that we have to rely on these devices. Every day, someone comes
up with a new something to either wreck our computers or to phish for
information from them.
A fairly big part of this software is training it to
recognise what you define as spam and what you regard as friendly
emails. On testing it on a clean set up it successfully blocked most
spam, but it also registered friendly emails as spam (rarely). There is
a way around this though but letting the program access your address
book and assigning all in it as friendlies.
The Spam Filtering client assists in scanning POP3
email accounts and supports Hotmail integration. Whilst the program will
scan any POP3 accounts, it is with your core Microsoft email clients
that it will really sing and dance and considering that most users are
going to be utilising those, it makes sense.
The personal firewall offers good protection for the PC but one of the
tough things is that the definitions against these attacks is all the
kooks in the world will through their little treats again McAfees and
Symantec firewalls first to try to break them. On testing however, the
firewall really performed well, even when playing game online without
too much degradation of system performance.
One of the things that I particularly liked in this
suite was the fact that the Privacy Filter is one of the easiest to
configure that I’ve had to use. All you had to do was simply assign
users to the group and ages. The software can then preconfigure access
to sites based on a profile. It makes allowing your children to use the
computer a much more relaxing experience. Whilst the settings are preset
you can then as the administrator add other sites that you know to be
not so good for young eyes. The pop up blocker that comes standard with
the package is also good and making sure that nasties are not popping
up, at least unannounced.
AntiVirus supported through VirusScan makes for an
effective solution to protecting your machine with regular updates that
are surprisingly unobtrusive in the way that they are delivered. McAfee
provides regular updates via email to let you know that there is a
threat in the wild or that they have provided a fix etc. It’s a very
effective way of communicating with clients to let them know that McAfee
takes its job very seriously.
I recommend this product. It’s a good piece of kit
with all the trimmings in the one box. The email scanning is a bit on
the slow side when you are dealing with a large volume of email but our
average home user wont have any dramas with it, only geeks like me who
deal with mass volumes of emails every day.
If you need to try a new package then you would not
be going wrong with Internet Security Suite 2006. |
