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DennisL
Former Member
Message 1 of 1

Does anyone know how intelligent (or not) the update/download process is?

Hi,

Does anyone know how the update downloads are implemented for v13.x?

I'm more than a little curious because I'm a "home" user "upgrading" from a v4.5.1 "enterprise" solution.  Enterprise solutions support downloading updates once and using them to update as many other installations as you want.  Home versions don't have this feature, but should in my opinion, and each installation has to download the 100MB+ periodic updates.

I live on the wrong side of the Digital Divide and my only viable connect option is dial-up (I have wireless broadband, but don't want to "waste" it on downloading multiple GB's of the same update data) and downloading 100MB at dial-up speeds would take 5-10 hours.  Obviously, downloading daily updates for mutliple computers would be unrealistic...

After installing v13.x on one of my computers and letting it try to update for 2 days, I've come to the conclusion that McAfee doesn't checkpoint downloads and starts over whenever the connection is lost.  If this is the case the update process is very inefficient (and dumb).  Can anyone comment?   I hope Developers frequent these communities; based on my interaction with tech support, I wouldn't expect this to be included in their training -- it would be too useful...

Has anyone ever wondered why the updates have gotten so large?  I remember when virus signature updates were small enough to fit on a floppy.  Unless McAfee is doing something stupid like downloading a 100MB of data that didn't change for every update (which gets my vote), how could there possibly be so much change daily?  Don't know about the "home" versions, but that's the size of the daily "enterprise" updates.

BR

Dennis

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