Review by David Stapleton

Let’s say that your computer has no protection suite and you have never used a competitor’s product, you will probably never know the difference and your system will be adequately protected from the worst scum of the universe. That is probably the strongest recommendation that I can bring myself to give for this suite.

I will start with the good on this review, because there is not really that much to say. The product installs easily (remember to uninstall any competitor’s product before trying the install of McAfee Total Protection, it will remind you if you have forgotten). Configuration is not difficult and the included products are pretty extensive (read the product description above, it has nearly everything you could hope for in protective software). That, however, pretty well sums up the good stuff.

On the flip side, after installing, I found that the boot time on my dual core Centrino system with 4GB memory, increased by minutes over the 10-20 seconds that I had come to expect with Norton 360 installed. I also had trouble registering the product even after multiple manual attempts. Online support was relatively helpless to help me resolve this problem, at least the first line team. I was eventually bumped to the true technical help (after first being advised to call the fee based help line). At this point the registration completed successfully. Throughout the process McAfee Total Protection had been advising me of new products that I might be interested in (remember those popup windows browsers used to display before popup blockers? Yeah, you get the picture). This required another online help session to turn off that setting on McAfee’s end (I was informed that this is a user selectable option, but once it is set, the user cannot change the setting, only McAfee can change it).

All in all, after a couple of days, I uninstalled the suite and reinstalled Norton 360. Boot time is back to what I expect and I do not see any unreasonable slowdowns or spurious alerts messages advertising products. I still prefer Norton Internet Security for the ease of non-standard configuration, but I can wait until after this year’s subscription expires to make the change. P-)