McAfee Internet Security Suite

My ISP provides me with a free copy of the Norton Internet Security Suite. I used that for a while, and found it didn't work well. Often I would find the Norton firewall blocking my access to online games. Unblocking that and setting up exceptions was often a hassle. And after every patch of a MMORPG the same problems reappeared. The program was also visibly slowing my computer down. Finally I had enough, I uninstalled the programm, and relied on the hardware firewall in my router, and the Windows XP built-in software firewall.

But the new laptop came with firewall and anti-virus from McAfee pre-installed, as trial version. And while I was looking for information about graphics cards, the McAfee programs managed to catch a Trojan who wanted to install itself on my PC. And the McAfee firewall didn't seem to be bothered by me playing WoW at all. So I decided the "trial" to have been successful, and went to buy the programs.

I ended up buying the McAfee Internet Security Suite from the US site of the company for $69.99. US and Canada residents get a $20 mail-in rebate. I hope this mail-in rebate mania doesn't reach Europe, I find them highly annoying. Either you find out you don't qualify, or getting you rebate is such a hassle that it's not worth the bother. I buy a software online, for download, pay online, but for the mail-in rebate I would have needed to print out a form, fill it out, and mail the form by snail mail.

Anyway $69.99 was still a lot cheaper than the €74.95 the same download costs in Euro land, or the £49.98 it costs in the UK. Taking advantage of the cheap dollar here, for a downloaded software it doesn't make a difference. Just had to uncheck the additional $6.99 for the extended download period of 1 year. My ADSL isn't that slow, I can live with a download period of 30 days, thank you. And burning the file on a CD is cheaper than $6.99.

I took the suite because it was cheaper than taking the firewall plus the anti-virus. So I got the privacy protection and anti-spam for free. Download and installation was easy. Running the update took a while, because it doesn't automatically update all 4 programs, you have to repeatedly restart the manual update until you are told that now everything is up to date. The privacy protection program was annoying me by asking for a password every time I rebooted, but I managed to find the option to switch that off.

As far as I understood the suite comes with 1 year worth of virus DAT files updates, after which you need to pay $34.99 for another year of protection. A bit like a MMORPG subscription, and probably justified in view of the everchanging viruses.

Thinking about security, I also turned on the Windows XP password login on the laptop. My two desktops are not password protected, as for somebody to access them, he would first need to break into my house. In which case I'd be more worried about him taking the whole computer than accessing it unauthorized. I guess most passwords on home computers are used to prevent your children from watching porn, or to prevent your spouse from finding out that *you* have been watching porn. Neither of which will work: Your children are expert hackers anyway, and have no problems bypassing imperfect nanny filters. And your wife will *always* find out what you did sooner or later. :)
- posted by Tobold @ 2:28 PM Permanent Link