McAfee VirusScan Online

McAfee is well known for its antivirus (AV) product, VirusScan, which enjoys Level 1 Checkmark accreditation from AV testing specialists West Coast Labs. This means it can detect all viruses known to be in the wild.

Virusscan Online uses the same AV engine, but has a simplified front end. The program offers a background check of incoming and outgoing traffic, plus an on-demand scan facility.

Once you've registered at the website and paid a minimum of a year's subscription, you can download the 5MB VirusScan Online. The program is compatible with most versions of Windows, though not, at the time of writing, with Windows XP in the UK. The £30 premium product is fully compatible with both versions of XP.

VirusScan Online consists of three parts: Activeshield, a background scanner; Scan, which scans selected files on demand; and Rescue Disk, which creates an emergency floppy to clean boot-sector viruses. It doesn't include Hawk, which spots suspicious activity (such as your email client sending similar emails to several recipients consecutively) or PDA synchronisation. Both these facilities are included in the retail VirusScan 6.0.

In common with its bigger brother, VirusScan checks for updates to the virus databases at intervals you set, using the McAfee website to download program updates and the latest virus description files. In the case of VirusScan Online, some of the update files can be large - over 1.5MB in one case. If there's a new upgrade release of the program during the period of your subscription, you will automatically receive it by download.

VirusScan Online is an unobtrusive application that gets on with its crucial job with a minimum of fuss.

System requirements

486-class processor or better, Windows 95, 98, Me (16MB of Ram), NT (32MB), 2000 (64MB), Internet Explorer 4.0 (5.5 recommended), 10MB hard disk space

Price

£17.95 (£15.28 ex VAT) for download and a year's update subscription

Contact

McAfee: www.mcafee.co.uk

See also:

Trend Micro PC-Cillin 2003

A user-friendly selection of security tools.  06 Jun 2003

Panda Antivirus Titanium

Panda Antivirus Titanium is a polished product offering good protection.  18 Jun 2002

Norton AntiVirus 2002

Update to Symantec's established antivirus software.  07 May 2002

Security software head-to-head

Norton Internet Security 2002 & McAfee Internet Security 4 slug it out in the antivirus arena.  30 Jan 2002

Like this story? Spread the news by clicking below:

 del.icio.us     Digg this     reddit!