While McAfee may be a very well-established player in the security field, the company's latest product, McAfee Internet Security Suite, has a surprising number of shortcomings.
If you want to go on with the 30-day trial of McAfee be sure that you are calm enough to head for the download and installation because this process may easily get annoying. First you have to open up an account in the McAfee website and then add your Internet Security product to cart for download. I do not like the idea of registering to a website and giving my e-mail to verify “I am who I claim to be” and check my e-mail to receive the automatic e-mail and then get back to the website. It all eats up time and I just want to download a simple installation file!
When you successfully complete the steps and reach the download page, you will have a small web installer of 650 kilobytes. You save it to your hard drive and run, where it connects to McAfee’s website and downloads the files it needs. I have chosen the “Typical” installation and as of 6th of May, the download size was 55.6 Megabytes. When the download was complete McAfee optimized my system automatically. There was also a habitual reboot.
At this point, I have to criticize McAfee for the following reasons:
- There was no integrity check. At least the installer could check the latest MD5 sums and see if the files downloaded are exactly the files on the server. The bottom-line is that it is a security product and I would better see it verifying the integrity of its files,
- The program does not go for an initial boot and memory scan. I would like to see the product interfere with the Windows’ boot and check the computer for a possible malware infection,
- The program tells absolutely nothing to the user. OK, simple is beautiful but at least I need to see what it did when it was “optimizing my protection and firewall settings”,
Other than that, the overall installation was very smooth and did not require any user intervention.