McAfee VirusScan 9.0 review

Jeff Bertolucci CNET

Published: 07 Oct 2004

McAfee VirusScan 9.0 won't knock your socks off with a slew of new viral-busting tools, but it is an incremental improvement over last year's impressive VirusScan 8.0. The latest version is better at detecting and deleting troublesome spyware programs, plus it's faster at scanning outbound email attachments and has retained the excellent McAfee Security Center interface. Like Norton AntiVirus (NAV), VirusScan 9.0 lacks a firewall, but at least NAV includes a port-blocking technology to thwart some inbound hacker threats. VirusScan isn't too much of a resource hog: during system scans, you'll still be able to use your PC as you normally would--open programs and files, surf the Net, and so on--without a significant performance hit. VirusScan 8.0 users should upgrade for the improved spyware detection, but new users should opt for an antivirus program with a firewall, such as last year's Editors' Choice winner, Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 11, or the newly released ZoneAlarm with Antivirus.

Setup & interface

In our informal tests, McAfee VirusScan 9.0 installed in less than 5 minutes. Fast, yes, but McAfee didn't run a scan before or after installation, which, in other antivirus programs, typically catches viruses during setup. Although you can always run a manual scan via Security Center, McAfee should have automated its setup scans to help inexperienced new users. By comparison, in our informal tests, Norton AntiVirus 2005, which performs both pre-setup and post-setup scans, took 45 minutes to install.

The McAfee Security Center screen gives you a graphical snapshot of your PC's vulnerability to viruses, spam, spyware and other threats. A series of security indexes, using a scale from 1 to 10, gauge your safety level. Helpful, yes, but essentially unchanged from last year. Dig deeper, however, and you'll see that McAfee has dropped version 8.0's austere configuration screen in favour of a tab-based, easier-to-read appearance akin to that of VirusScan 7.0. This makes VirusScan 9.0's configuration options, such as how to schedule an automated scan, easy to locate.

Outlook users will like the VirusScan icon that inserts itself on the standard toolbar. You can now run a quick email scan simply by clicking this icon. Like leading competitors Norton AntiVirus and PC-cillin Internet Security, VirusScan automatically scans both inbound and outbound email.

Features

VirusScan 9.0 is a top-flight viral warrior, and it has the skills to prove it. It runs in the background, stealthily scanning Internet downloads, along with instant-messenger and email attachments, for viruses, worms, Trojan horses and malevolent ActiveX Controls and Java applets. VirusScan also searches for spyware and adware -- or, in McAfee parlance, Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) -- during system scans.

But any good antivirus program does all this, right? Yes, but VirusScan does it without bringing your computer to its knees, which is more than we can say for archrival Norton AntiVirus. During a VirusScan system scan, we were able to use our test PC normally -- loading programs and files and surfing the Net -- with only a slight performance hit. For example: Microsoft Word loaded in 6 seconds during a McAfee scan, whereas Word took 35 seconds to load during a NAV scan. But there's a price to pay for VirusScan's frugality: longer scans. In our informal tests, it took McAfee 48 minutes to scan our 12GB disk partition, whereas NAV took a mere 37 minutes to scan the same volume.

VirusScan 9.0 takes less time to inspect file attachments, an important consideration for outbound email. If the scan takes too long, many email clients will time out and refuse to send the message. In our tests, VirusScan took six minutes to scan a 4MB outbound email attachment, putting it on a par with NAV's performance.

Are there any shortcomings? Given its £34.99 (inc. VAT) retail price, VirusScan 9.0 should include a firewall or at least a port-blocking technology to stop unsolicited inbound packets. We'd like to see real-time detection of spyware, a feature found in McAfee's higher-end, business-oriented antivirus programs.

Performance

In our labs tests, VirusScan 9.0 produced the same amount of a drag on system performance as Symantec's Norton AntiVirus 2005 and Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 11. The lightest hit on system resources came from Computer Associates' eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005. VirusScan took longer to scan our 1.3GB hard drive than both PC-cillin and eTrust EZ Antivirus.

To measure VirusScan's impact on system performance, we use BAPCo's SysMark 2002, an industry-standard benchmark. The Internet-content-creation portion of SysMark measures a desktop's performance running off-the-shelf applications, such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Windows Media Encoder and Macromedia Dreamweaver. We did not run the office-productivity portion of the benchmark because it incorporates McAfee VirusScan 5.13.

Our test system was a Dell Dimension 8200 running Windows XP Professional, with an Intel Pentium 4 1.9GHz processor and 256MB of RDRAM. With VirusScan running, our test system scored a 94 -- meaning there was a 6 percent reduction in overall system speed. By comparison, NAV 2005 also scored a 94, a 6 percent reduction. An Internet-content-creation score of 100 represents the performance of our test system without any extraneous software running. In a test of scanning speed, VirusScan took an average of 6.68 minutes to scan a 1.3GB directory -- nowhere near as fast as speed-demon PC-cillin, which averaged 2.48 minutes.

Antivirus software: impact on system performance
	Test system	McAfee VirusScan 9.0 (2005)	Norton AntiVirus 2005	Trend Micro PC-cillin Internet Security 11	CA eTrust EZ Antivirus 2005
SysMark2002 Internet-content-creation (ICC) score	233	219	220	227	233
Normalised score	100	94	94	94	100
Percentage degradation	n/a	6	6	6	0
Average boot time (s)	38.9	51	71	45	47
Scan 1.3GB directory; average scan time (min.)	n/a	6.68	6.1	2.48	2.56

In past VirusBulletintests, McAfee's VirusScan has been tested only once, back in June 2002, and it passed. By comparison, Norton AntiVirus has been tested 10 times and earned the coveted VB 100 Percent title each time. NAV is one of the few products tested to consistently win the VB 100 Percent award. Previous versions of VirusScan have also been certified by the independent antivirus-testing laboratories at West Coast Checkmark, ICSA Labs, and Checkvir.com.

Service & support

We found McAfee's email and online-chat support for VirusScan to be very good this year. Queries were answered promptly -- for instance, we received a response to an email question within 20 minutes -- and the technical staff were polite and professional. Online chat is available 24/7, and McAfee promises a 24-hour response time for email queries. McAfee's online VirusScan support site is very well organised and easy to navigate.

McAfee also offers free phone support between 8am and 5pm Monday to Friday. By comparison, Symantec charges Norton AntiVirus users £18 per incident.

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