mcafee total protection

Hi, atm my neighbor has mcafee secuirty centre installed as a 90 day trial and after that he will ask me what to do next. can you install macafee total protection over the top of the old version?

also with mcafee secuirty centre it opens internet explorer to get updates for the av etc and when its doing those updates it reports in the security centre that that component is not running? same thing with firewall anti spam etc.
is this like antivir where the kernal protection is running but the gui tells you its not or are you really not protected at this point? because if it does turn off protection at that point its not really safe.