McAfee VirusScan 7 Home Edition review

VirusScan 7 Home Edition is similar to Norton's AntiVirus in that it provides on-access and on-demand scanners, and communicates with Microsoft Office to protect against macro nasties.

It also comes with some clever tools that prevent viruses from entering your system via Pocket PC, Palm and EPOC handheld computers.

As with Norton, you can use VirusScan to create emergency floppy disks to recover from a dramatic virus attack, but uniquely, this package also includes a program called Safe and Sound that creates backups of your documents as you work on them. Should disaster strike, you can recover them using a Windows or DOS utility.

Despite the inclusion of 'intelligent' virus activity-tracking features, VirusScan ignores changes to hard disk settings - something that Norton has always checked. The e-mail scanner is effective though, and detected us sending multiple e-mails within a short period of time - a common sign of virus activity. There is also support for Microsoft Exchange e-mail, which is really only useful for business setups. However, strangely, there is no password protection for the utility's settings, which means that it is not suitable for big business use. As with previous versions, it's quite hard to find and activate the heuristic settings, which spot previously unknown viruses based on their behaviour.

If you disable the on-access scanner it will, by default, re-enable itself 60 minutes later. This is useful, as you may need to turn off virus protection when resources are low and you want to play a game that your PC only just copes with. And it's easy to forget to re-enable detection afterwards. You can alter the time for the service to restart, or disallow suspension of detection completely.

Despite costing £10 more than McAfee VirusScan, Norton AntiVirus 2003 has advanced slightly further since the previous version. There's nothing wrong with McAfee's product, but we're disappointed they haven't fixed a few of the rough edges that we saw when we reviewed version 6.