McAfee Unveils Beta Versions of Two New Consumer Security Suites

McAfee Unveils Beta Versions of Two New Consumer Security Suites

http://www.mcafee.com/us/about/press/corporate/2006/20060616_181510_y.html

McAfee Total Protection Beta: 40MB download

McAfee VirusScan Plus Beta: 20MB download

Both products are for XP only at the moment, although other OS will be added to the final release, according to the release notes.

 

Mcafee beta seems to be very heavy on the system, if you go with full blown total protection plus. I am impressed with the features especially the interface. It shows your internet connectivity visually. I havn't tested the backup feature beacuse it takes toll on my resources. I would post my other findings of this beta soon.

 

With this policy McAfee will soon confuse its customers with umpteen choices for security suites

 

I gave it a try. It has been removed. It seemed pretty heavy. Some web pages took too long to load, and I'm on cable. I didn't like the Security Center. Takes too long to load, too many clicks to get to where you want to go. Worse then the old Security Center. Maybe McAfee will make improvements.

 

I don't understand why are companies moving away from functional, fast and simple interfaces to virtually more user friendly, but in fact they just create more complicated and less simply/user friendly. It was the same with lets say NVIDIA and ATi control panels. From slick and slim panels where you could quickly do what you wanted they now modified them to interfaces with hundreds of subcategories where you need 5 clicks just to get to your belowed option. Bunch of preview windows that no one uses and stuff like that. Symantec is sticking to their proven interface just because of that.
And even they screwed it up with that second tray icon and panel with bunch of useless meters about security status. Who really needs that crap?
Salut to those who manage to actually improve new interface over old one.
It appears not many are actually capable to do this.

 

Gee..that has to be the slowest server in the universe. Told me it would take two hours to download. I have a broadband connection at 5000kbps down. I cancelled and tried again and that time it said over 3 hours to download! So, I cancelled it again after letting the download stablize at 42KB/Sec where it should be more like 500KB/sec at least. I was doing a custom install too and left off some of the options so it should have downloaded in a couple of minutes. Heck, I even installed the latest version of Fx so I can test this. (I had a really old version on a virtual machine where I planned to test this). So, I go to the trouble of getting the latest Fx and then can't get a decent download speed using that stupid download manager stuff from McAfee. They need to allow direct download as then if I got a bad connection the next time it would probably be fine. But this way...

 

I've installed Virusscan beta. Here is some Screenshots:
http://i5.tinypic.com/14ul15h.jpg
http://i5.tinypic.com/14ul1ld.jpg
http://i6.tinypic.com/14ul312.jpg
http://i6.tinypic.com/14ul3ef.jpg
http://i6.tinypic.com/14ul4au.jpg
http://i5.tinypic.com/14ul7d0.jpg

 

I agree Mele20. Very slow download and install. It seemed to take forever to install. Actually, it was 20 minutes for the entire process. And like I said in my post above, I'm on cable. There was something else I didn't like about this new McAfee. I notice with all the entries to my registry, and there were a hell of a lot, there was an America Online entry. Why the hell should there be an America Online entry into my registry after installing this thing? I've had McAfee VS 10 on my computer a few months back, and there wasn't any AOL entry in the registry. I was going to give this new McAfee a chance, but when I saw that, I didn't want anything to do with it. There seems to be more and more junk going into these new AVs. I guess the manufacturers think that is what people want. Maybe that is what the people want. Not me.

 

I'm sorry it was so slow for you, but glad to know it is not just me. I have tried at various hours to get it at a halfway decent speed and cannot. I have canceled each time thinking another try at a different hour would be faster...but no. So, the install was also slow...ugh. I was about to just go ahead and let it take a long time to download but if the install is slow too...

Now that you have said there is an AOL entry...well, I may just forget the whole thing. I am installing it on a virtual machine and made a snapshot just before I tried to download so I can easily revert to that to get AOL, etc off if I don't like the beta at all. This virtual machine only has 256 MB RAM allocated to it and that is the minimum the beta requires so it might run really poorly plus the OS is XP Pro SP1 not 2.

It still does web updates but now allows Fx to get them? It's using Fx is mostly why I wanted to try it. I'm thinking though that if the server to get the beta from is so extremely slow, how slow will the definition updates be?

You know, I think that when I hand combed the registry to clean McAfee that came on this computer in February that I found AOL entries that RegCleaner had not gotten that were part of McAfee. I removed McAfee immediately when I got the computer because it required ActiveX and IE for updating so I didn't explore it at all and I haven't used any McAfee in years now.

 

I went ahead and downloaded (4 and one-half min) and installed. It didn't take long to install but I declined the antispam, site advisor, wireless and one other something.

It was unusable. The GUI was all messed up so I couldn't interact with it but just a little. It had text on top of text and items at the bottom were cut off and no way to scroll to them.

It had parental controls on and no way I could see to turn that off. I had no way to look at the settings for the firewall, privacy or the AV. Plus, the help file indicated that there IS NO WAY to change the settings! Maybe I got a bad install or something, but I have never seen such a bad AV. McAfee was ok back when I had 4.2 and could configure it. I tried McAfee a couple of years ago and the firewall also and I loved the firewall back then and it was configurable but the AV engine wouldn't work for me ...constant crashing...otherwise, though a couple of years ago I liked McAfee. This version is just awful though. I could not configure ANYTHING except add websites to the parental control which I wanted to turn off and you can't do that as far as I could see.

I uninstalled it and that messed up the Proxomitron so that it no longer controlled gif animation here. I had to revert to an old snapshot to get my computer back to normal. I clicked on the wrong snapshot though and am back with an old Fx version after all the work I did to get the new version I installed for McAfee working properly. Ah well...at least McAfee is totally gone.

 

Mele20

Sorry to hear you had the problems after uninstalling McAfee. That's about the only thing that went smoothly for me.

The only problem I had with the GUI was, when I would click on Home after configuring the AV, firewall, etc, I kept getting an error message. I would have to close the GUI and open it again.

I don't understand the AOL registry entry. What do McAfee AV and AOL have to do with each other? Maybe a McAfee expert can answer that. Maybe I shouldn't be too hard on it, it is a beta after all. I was really hoping it would be something special though.


PS...I was happy to see that this McAfee version has an activity log. Something VS 10 was lacking.

 

I couldn't even see where the firewall configuration was! I posted in the McAfee beta forum about this. Maybe you should post there with the AOL question.

I just installed the Enterprise8.5i Beta II. So far, I love it! The only problem with it so far is that it cannot install the help file and doesn't say why.

I cannot understand how an AV vendor could produce such an outstanding product as the Enterprise beta and at the same time produce such an incredibly bad consumer product.

 

Same with Norton. The main reason is that they have 2 completely different teams working on the Home and Corporate versions.

Further, there is also a big difference in the quality of support offered for both products; the Corporate support being much superior! So overall, in the corporate environment you will not find the same level of complaints.

Corporate users who pay the big bucks would not stand for the problems seen with the Home versions.

 

have they stopped dealing with the devil? sorry ActiveX (updates)

 

Yes. It is preferred that Norton or McAfee put more resources to focus on the enterprise version and produce just one product with optional plug-ins for the enterprise and the home version. They may drop some features that is only applicable to the enterprise, and make it a home version, or to offer some additional plug-ins or features that is only applicable to the home version, rather than to create two different products for the enterprise and the home.

When the enterprise version is already very good, why waste resources to create another home product from scratch?

 

I'll cut/n/pate my reply from BetaNews..

I gave this one a go on two systems; one a Centrino 1.7GHz with 512MB of RAM, and the other a 2.5GHz Athlon64 system with 1GB of RAM. Both suffered the same horrific fate: longer boot times, sluggish response, and loads of useless extras that I couldn't seem to skip installing in the first place.

While I didn't end up with crash after crash, and while it did protect me from a myriad of attempted intentional infections, the cost to performance simply wasn't worth it. I will continue to retest over the course of the beta, but given past experiences with McAffee's commercial software I doubt we'll see a performance improvement.

Symantec and McAfee both could take a lesson from other anti-malware companies. These two companies should really take the following to heart: Eset's heuristics (and now F-Prot, with one of NOD32's heuristics experts working there now) and low system req, kaspersky's updates, interface, and low system req, and the simple yet effective UIs of F-Prot 6.0 Beta and Antivir.

Syamntec and McAfee are the market leaders because they're the marketING leaders. So long as they continue wasting CPU cycles and memory space with programs that are outclassed in all categories by cheaper lesser-knowns, I don't see myself recommending them to any of my commercial customers again.

 

I'm confused. Which McAfee product did you give a go? I assume the Enterprise beta which is currently beta2? What installed that you didn't want? I had nothing install that I didn't want. I did a custom install.

I am puzzled by how the product could slow down your two computers so much. I have it on a VMWare Workstation 5.5 virtual machine. This machine only has 256MB RAM allocated to it. I haven't seen any slowdowns in surfing yet (I have only had it a day so problems could crop up in the future). This computer boots faster than my host computer that has KAV 2006. KAV really slows booting. I have to sit and wait for it to finish scanning before I can use my desktop and that machine is a 3.8 GhZ Pentium IV with 2 GB RAM. So, I think McAfee is doing great. McAfee does have a lot of processes running but so far it is not making the machine sluggish. I think KAV is much harder on a machine than McAfee Enterprise 8.5iBeta2 especially considering that KAV is on the far more powerful machine.

One other thing about the Enterprise version. I had mentioned earlier that I tried repeatedly to get a decent download speed for the home version and never could. I finally had to download it at 70KB/sec. When I downloaded the enterprise version, I didn't have to try more than once. It downloaded at 580KB/sec. That huge discrepancy says to me that McAfee doesn't care in the least about the home user and deliberately gives them a pathetic download speed but cares very much about the corporate user and gives them a favorable download speed.