8.9

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.