Hi,
This is something that has been bugging me for years... Remember when virus signature updates were small enough to fit on a floppy? Now it's 100MB+ worth of data daily!!!
I am "upgrading" from v4.5.1 SP1 (an enterprise solution) to v13.x. I was annoyed to find that "home" products don't have the ability to download an update (SDAT, DAT, or XDAT) once that can be used to update multiple installations.
For anyone with a slow network connection (i.e. dial-up), having to do frequent (daily) updates involving downloads of 100MB+ of data on multiple machines is a non-starter. If you care to do the math, 100MB @ 48kbps = 4.6 hours; assuming 100% bandwidth utilization could be achieved/sustained. Realistically, it's going to be 10 hours. Even if a faster link was available to me and the updates could be done in a tenth of that time; the reality is that McAfee is wasting a lot of time and bandwidth that isn't theirs to waste.
Why can't McAfee figure out a way to download the deltas instead? It would be much more efficient to add and subtract dozens of signatures vs. downloading all of the stuff that didn't change for *every* update. This isn't rocket science, but apparently, there aren't many coders of that caliber working at on the update methodology.
Why wouldn't McAfee make the "download once and update many clients" capability available to Home/Home Office Users? Organizations large enough to be considered enterprise customers have high speed internet connections. The rest of us have dial-up, DSL, cable, wireless broadband, or (yuk) satelite which maxes out at less than a tenth of the high speed options.
I haven't been using v13.x long. I certainly hope it isn't as much of a resource hog as the other McAfee versions I've used (I hear there are less resource intensive products from others). I'm only using v13.x because the company I work for gives it to employees free. If I had to pay for a virus scanner, I'd do the research...
Enterprise Users have an option to contact McAfee regarding enhancements. Apparently they think Home users aren't smart enough to offer any meaningful suggestions...
BR
Dennis
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