John A. Lind wrote:
><snip>
>Version 7 is very likely the last version of McAfee AV I will use (until
>it's beyond no longer supported) unless Network Associates changes the
>configuration of their software. Starting with version 8, it is absolutely
>impossible to turn off McAfee from "phoning home" to check for updates and
>. . . get this . . . issue extremely annoying "Virus Alerts" to the
>user. This becomes beyond annoyance when using a dial-up account and
>suffering a continuous stream of balloon pop-ups from the MODEM dialer
>wanting to dial out. I had a running series of exchanges about version 8
>with McAfee's tech support that escalated several layers up their support
>chain until I was finally told that NO, "phoning home" could not be turned
>off (in spite of the configuration panel supposedly supporting that), that
>McAfee had no intention of ever allowing it to be turned off. Furthermore,
>McAfee seemed quite baffled that someone might want to be in control of
>things like that (it's an essential feature, not a flaw). The
>"work-around" to prevent the continuous stream of dialer pop-ups was
>extremely cumbersome; completely unworkable with some operating system and
>software configurations (including mine).
>
>
Yes, I ran into that too. The Norton subscription for my laptop had
expired a few months ago. McAfee had a double rebate through one of the
Office retailers so that it ws free after rebates, so I got it. My poor
old laptop runs Win98 and has only 192mb of memory. McAfee AV is a
terrible choice for it. It loads all kinds of things into memory that
are difficult to get around. And it uses the Win scheduler to time
it's operation, which adds another memory/processer load I don't need.
And as you say, it phones home as soon as it can during the boot up
process, making it really tedious. I finally just set the firewall to
not let it call out to the web without approval. That did stop part of
the problem and I can update when I want to, but what a stupid design.
>Also starting with version 8, it's extremely difficult (impossible ?? I
>never figured it out) to custom configure the virus scanning in detail. In
>short, version 8 and newer wants to "hold the end user's hand" which might
>be OK for the Compleat Idiot who still thinks a CD/DVD tray is a coffee mug
>holder, but it's not for me . . .
>
Ah, I wondered if that was the case.
><snip>
>As you might guess . . . I'm a bit miffed with Network Associates and the
>direction they've taken McAfee AV . . . it USED to be a great product. Not
>any more.
>
>
All I paid for it was sales tax and some time to wait for the rebates -
and I think it was overpriced. Never again! I don't know about the
others, but I've been using Norton AV for many years, both at work and
home and NEVER caught a virus. It obviously has less impact on computer
resources, it's highly configureable and it works. That's enough for me.
Moose
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