Some Mcafee Virusscan 8.5i related questions

Hi, I'm using the above mentioned antivirus because my university provides it for free. However, I'm having doubts on whether it actually works or not.

Just earlier today I inserted my thumb drive into my friend's PC which had kaspersky installed, and I was shocked when right away a message came up on top of the taskbar saying that my thumb drive was infected by a solow virus. Just before that I put the thumb drive into my laptop and mcafee didn't say anything. I'm pretty sure that drive was infected from a long ago incident and hence would be infected when I put it into my laptop.

After meddling with the settings abit, I concluded that you can't even make virusscan scan thumb drives automatically when they are plugged in, which I think is horrible. Furthermore, in all the time I've been using it the virusscan hasn't detected a single virus/spyware even though I have the spyware module installed.

So I guess my question is, does anyone else here use this virusscan or similar versions and what do you think about it? And, I'm considering switching to Avast which I hear is the best free antivirus. Does Avast at least scan thumbdrives automatically?

Thanks for your help.

 

Why not go for Avira Premium. it's cheap and has one of the best detection rates around. Pair it up with Comodo free firewall and you should be very well protected from viruses and spyware.

 

If you insert a thumb drive and your computer acesses it mcafee will scan it as long as you have the on access scan enabled which is the default.

 

yea bigc73542 I know what you mean now. So this means that it DID scan my thumb drive but didn't detect the virus. How are mcafee's detection abilities in everybody's opinion?

 

I personally believe that they are better than average on detection but not the best. An average user would be well served by it. But if you are a risky surfer and visit questionable sites then there are better choices.

bigc