Recently I dumped Symantic anitvirus and switched to McAfee Security Suite. Thought it would be good to have firewall, anti spam and antivirus all in one package.

The first thing that happened was I discovered I couldn't FTP to my web site. It always timed out where in the past it had worked flawlessly. Called McAfee and the gal at curtomer service told me that if I would change my email settings everything would be fine "I guarantee it," she said. Didn't seem to me like changing email would help FTP and it didn't. After about two weeks of experimentation I discovered I had to turn off ther Windows firewall. The manual had indicated you could run both firewalls but if the customer service had had any brains seems like they would have known that could create problems in some instances.

Then, no messages showed up when I checked Email even though I knew a message had been sent. Sometimes they would eventually show up hours later-- sometimes they wouldn't. Then I noticed that as soon as I went on line, my activity light stayed on for at least 5 minutes even though I wasn't doing anything. Apparently security suite was "phoning home." Until the little chat was over I could barely pull up a web page.

The solution? I dumped my brand new Security Suite, installed AVG antivirus (free) and a stand-alone pop up blocker. Now my email is back to normal and messages come in immediately. And I don't have to wait five minutes while Security Suite talks to daddy.

I should say McAfee might be great if you have high speed Internet. But I'm dial-up and the best speed I can get is 28.8. McAfee wasn't designed with me in mind.

Forty bucks (Costco price) down the drain.

I feel McAfee Security Suite is a good product that has saved me out of a few scary situations and my e-mail did have to be tweeked a little because my ISP's spam filter and McAfee's spam filter conflicted. I too am on dial-up and get 28.8 to 37.2 kbps.

I think AVG's customer service is not as bright as McAfees'. I e-mailed AVG before to ask why AVG scans less files than my (at the time) Norton on my Win Xp and they responed back saying that the reason is because AVG does not scan through DOS. When did Xp ever have DOS?

Sec. Suite also has a spyware remover that is an excellent add on to Ad-Aware and Spybot. Last year it caught 6 or 7 spyware nasties that all the other free or trial spyware programs didn't detect or remove.

MCSE Certified

Minesweeper Consultant & Solitare Expert

Hello... Although I am not familiar with the McAfee Security Suite package, I do have their Virus Scan and have always been pleased with it. It does not seem to be as heavily bloated as Norton, nor as problematic neither. For some reason, there is an extremely large number of posts regarding Norton being problematic and a huge hog with system resources.
I am on a Comcast cable connection here, so maybe that accounts for McAfee's ease of use for me. (speedwise / cable, I mean..)

Take care everyone...
~Tommyo

AV's are normally a personal preference more than anything else and the opinions are rarely based on any actual fact, more perception or what someone heard from someone else. That being said, I am not a fan of Mcafee at all. I have worked in IT and been a NW Admin for better than 10 years in an Enterprise environment and have personally seen/used pretty much all of them at one time or another and have to say that from my experience in a corp as well as small business and even home environment that Symantec and Trend Micro have easily been the most reliable, easiest to administer, and just the best overall packages. McAfee, on the other hand, has consistantly been problematic even at the Enterprise level (McAfee EPO - I say even at te Enterprise level as those are usually a AV companies best/most robust products). I cannot recomend anything any higher than Symantec Or Trend Micro (from a home user stand point, I think Trend may even be a little better than Symantec with it's new Internet Suite)but McAfee is much more resource intensive, buggier, unreliabe, etc. By all means try them all and form your own opinions but, my opinions are coming from someone with 10+ years of experience and MCSE, MCSA, MCDBA, and MCDBA certifications...