McAfee AntiVirus Plus

McAfee AntiVirus Plus scans your computer for viruses and removes them, while preventing new infections. The comprehensive application suite features a real-time scanner and firewall.

Its complete package includes McAfee Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware, Personal Firewall, QuickClean and Shredder, SiteAdvisor, and Vulnerability Scanner.

Once installed, McAfee AntiVirus Plus creates an icon in the system tray area, where you can bring up the main window divided into multiple panels.

The scan mode can be performed quick (Windows files, processes, registry items, boot records), full or custom, and you have the possibility to schedule scans, as well as to enable the computer to automatically power off if no threats are found. Results reveal total found and fixed issues.

You can turn off the real-time scanner at any time, adjust its security level, or make it focus on programs and documents only, as well as include email and instant messaging attachments, network and removable drives.

Aside from viruses, trojans, worms, bots and rootkits, the real-time shield is able to protect the system from Internet Explorer and Firefox scripts, spyware and other potentially unwanted programs. Protection may be boosted using "Active Protection" and virus scans by identifying threat patterns.

When it comes to McAfee's firewall, you can control traffic (smart or monitored access, stealth, lockdown), enable "Smart Advice", block Internet access at startup, allow ICMP ping requests, enable UDP tracking, log events to file, restrict program access to the web, as well as avoid risky connections via "Net Guard", among others.

As far as the additional modules go, SideAvisor provides ratings and reports with safe websites, Shredder wipes data and prevents specialized tools from retrieving it (like Recuva), QuickClean erases unnecessary files (such as old ActiveX programs), Vulnerability Scanner downloads the latest Windows and applications updates, while My Home Network enables you to repair network security issues.

McAfee AntiVirus Plus integrates into the Explorer context menu to scan custom locations and shred data. It uses low CPU and RAM, but the virus scanning procedure takes a pretty long time to finish.  We have not come across any issues in our evaluation, as the application suite did not hang or crash. McAfee AntiVirus Plus is easy to use and supplies users with the security they need to protect their computer from e-threats.