The existence of two products using the McAfee name, McAfee VirusScan Online (located at www.mcafee.com) and McAfee VirusScan 5.x, 6.x, and 7.x (located at www.mcafee-at-home.com or at www.networkassociates.com), is confusing. As far as we know, the original McAfee Antivirus was sold by their owner, Network Associates, and is today known as McAfee VirusScan Online. Later Network Associates released a new antivirus program, today known as McAfee VirusScan. Both products are using the same antivirus engine. VirusScan has more features, but can, according to user feedback, sometimes be difficult to install and is often unstable. VirusScan Online on the other hand is a smaller, more reliable program, with several of its crucial components actually residing on McAfee's server rather than on your computers hard disk. 

Update: Recently Network Associates has taken steps to reacquire McAfee VirusScanOnline. If they are successful these two products may end up being merged into one. 

It's our opinion that McAfee VirusScan is far from as good as you could get the impression of by reading some reviews, where McAfee VirusScan often trails Norton Anti-Virus. We believe McAfee VirusScan suffers from many of the flaws of Norton Anti-Virus. Those are instability, difficult to install, difficult to uninstall, and just generally lacking many of the features that we want in a good antivirus program. 

Just as Norton Anti-Virus, McAfee VirusScan offers poor archive support and is vulnerable to attacks. Also beware of the fact that many users has experienced trouble with the CD version of this release. The good thing is that McAfee VirusScan has an excellent detection record, but that's just not enough since the program doesn't scan all types of files. It also fails to remove many viruses. 

Overall, the new version is an improvement from previous releases, but it's still not good enough. Therefore we cannot recommend this product yet. Improved stability and support for more archive formats could change that.

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