McAfee VirusScan 5 review

With over 45,000 reported viruses and more appearing on a daily basis, it's essential that you protect your PC.

McAfee's VirusScan has a well-established reputation as one of the top anti-virus products, and it now drops to a price that makes it easily affordable for home and business users alike.

VirusScan's all-new installation routine conducts an interview, during the course of which you can decide when to schedule regular scans, create a rescue boot disk set and take advantage of the new Safe and Sound utility. This automatically takes copies of selected documents to a free area of the hard disk that appears as a separate volume in Windows Explorer. This is a useful precaution, but not a substitute for proper backup, as the copied data is on the same PC - in a system failure, you could lose the lot.

Your first line of defence is the VShield real-time scanner, which once installed runs permanently in the background. It keeps a close eye on files that are created, renamed, modified, copied or executed, and will block access to any it suspects are infected. Protection against Internet-borne viruses is essential, and VShield will scan all downloads as well as ActiveX controls and Java applets. You can also block access to specific web sites using either a URL or IP address. E-mail attachments get the same treatment and VirusScan works with most of the popular products such as Outlook, Eudora, NetScape and AOL.

VirusScan also provides on-demand scanning and a scheduler is included so you can run it at regular intervals. It had no problems spotting all fifty-two of our genuine viruses although twelve couldn't be repaired. This isn't a failing on McAfee's part as some file viruses cause so much damage that it is far safer to replace the infected file with a clean copy from your last backup. There's no need to panic if a virus is detected as VirusScan leads you gently through a clean-up process where you can opt to clean the infected file, quarantine it to another location on your hard disk or delete it.

This is undoubtedly one of the best anti-virus products around and you can keep it up to date as McAfee posts regular free downloads on its web site. Viruses are a constant threat and, at this low price, there's no excuse for not protecting your PC - get VirusScan and slam the door shut in their faces.