I have 2 McAfee subscriptions. One of them was renewed on June. The other one is pending of renewal in Christmas.
But I'm considering whether to renew or not, for some reasons:
1. McAfee does not have legacy compatibility.
To update the antivirus .DAT files, you have to have the most recent VirusScan engine (I.e. 2008 has expired; 2009 is going to expire soon). To use that engine, you have to have a newer operating system, wich implies a better processor and more memory. This makes McAfee a bad soft for people having legacy computers mixed with current ones, like me --New viruses use to affect old systems too.
2. Network sharing in home version is a mess.
See my messages at https://community.mcafee.com/message/148798#148798
3. Many, many false positives.
McAfee antivirus discovers all viruses, but it also gives a bunch of false positives. If the false positive is reported as "unwanted software", you can mark it as "trusted" --but when it's reported as "virus", you can't trust it. Many of my homemade .cmd files were reported as viruses.
You can send false positives to McAfee, sure, but they are being examined by, guess, the same engine that marked as false positives in your home.
There is another way, you can make a "developer" account in mcafee and send your programs in order to be examined by a human, but you can only send software developed by you.
You can't exclude directories from being analyzed, so you can't put your homemade batch archives in a special directory to avoid them being scanned.
Do you remember "Pete and the Wolf"? If your antivirus tells you everything is a virus, you end up untrusting the antivirus and trusting the virus...
4. Bad management of detection history and reports.
When you run a scan, McAfee says he has detected NNN viruses, and tells you to see the report. But, guess what?, the report contains the same figures you already saw. It does not show *which* viruses did it found, or *where*.
In order to see the information, you have to open the "Quarantine" window -- And you can't sort it by date: even when you click on the date, some items remain unsorted.
5. Auto-renewal by default.
Until last may, I did not see an easy way to cancel auto-renewal without talking to a technician. Are McAfee technicians merely sales officers?
Last may I received a message telling me how to cancel auto-renewal without such mess. --But I think it was too late.
6. Help is on the net.
What if I'm on the mountains, with a 64kbps mobile connection and a pay-per-kb data plan --or even without mobile connectivity? I want to have the help html files back in my own computer, to read them offline.
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