RSSMcAfee Consumer Products Enter Public Beta
By Nate Mook | Published May 30, 2002, 7:55 AM
The consumer division in Network Associates' McAfee Business Unit on Thursday announced the first public beta release of its consumer products line, which includes the popular McAfee VirusScan suite. The company has opened participation to all interested parties, and is also looking for suggestions from testers as it revamps the beta program.
The list of betas includes McAfee VirusScan Home Edition 7.0, McAfee VirusScan Professional Edition 7.0, McAfee Internet Security 5.0, McAfee Firewall 4.0, and McAfee QuickClean 3.0. Each program is expected to run until mid-July and contain two beta phases and a release candidate. Release notes are available, along with a "Getting Started Guide" for those not familiar with the product.
Notable changes include Microsoft Office integration and a malicious script stopper in the VirusScan 7.0 beta, and a home network wizard in McAfee Firewall. The upcoming version of McAfee Internet Security will feature spyware detection, a pop-up blocker, and newsgroup filtering.
For those interested in the McAfee Consumer Products beta program, the company has set up a new Web site that lists products in beta and general information on beta testing. Details of specific features to thoroughly test in each release are covered as well. The company requests that all bugs or questions be sent via e-mail.
Mcafee has never made anything close to a good product! Why would anyone use it? The antivirus doesnt work, It takes forever to scan. Quick clean is a joke. It is useless. Sorry but that is the truth!
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|"Why would anyone use it?"
Because, unlike you, many thousands of people have had excellent experiences with McAfee products. Remember, the fact that YOU had problems does not automatically mean the product is bad.
"The antivirus doesnt work, It takes forever to scan."
Wrong and wrong. Perhaps those are true for YOUR particular system, but they are not generally true for everyone.
"Sorry but that is the truth!"
No. It is your individual opinion. (There's a big difference)
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|Just try Kaspersky Anti-Virus - it has only 5-50Kb updates including core, extractors changes etc.! The whole base is only 3Mb.
Just try it out!
www.kaspersky.com
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|How can you give such a title to such a very slow program? It takes forever no matter what parts of the program you might be using. The scanning methods need to speeded up somewhat to say the least, it took over 3 minutes to delete a 1 1/2 MB program!! Not impressed even if it is only in beta. The faults are already showing! How about not being able to register the program.
As for their firewall Bah Humbug! It blocked everything including IE even when I allowed everything! Sorry but to get my money for the full product on release you are going to have to do a lot better as there are much better programs out there for less anyway! Well that's my 2 cents!
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|2 cents says you didn't submit any bug reports either. It's one thing to complain about problems in order to help the company make a better product, but it does no good to complain just for the sake of complaining. Tip: companies want constructive beta testers, not ones that whine about there being better products on the market.
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|I have tiny personal firewall and it said to uninstall before i continue. Yeah right, like i would use something mcafee made to protect me. Ill stay with norton!
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|Guess you didn't bother to read the release notes before you tried to install.
The Release Notes have a list of software that the Beta version is not compatible with.
Personally, I'm kind of glad that you chose not to go ahead with the install. I'm pretty sure that you're a REALLY bad choice for a beta tester if you couldn't even be bothered to read the Release Notes before installing the Beta software.
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|i agree totally, if you want to be a beta tester then you need to follow what the company says, i work in QA and it is so annoying when external BETA testers when choose complain about having to uninstall software. I dont think they understand exactly what BETA testing is. If you are a real BETA tester then you will give your system totally over to the product you are testing, it is common during beta testing for your machine to be killed totally requiring a complete reformat, it is the risk you take when you decide to BETA test.
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|I agree, a beta tester should have a minimum of two PC's that can be loaded/blown away at any given moment. (I have 3, and a spare 6GB notebook drive that I reload almost weekly haha)
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|I read the release notes. I have a seperate pc specifically for beta testing. I was commenting on the pre disposition that mcafee wants you to use their built in firewall with virus scan. Whether or not they fix this in the future, I guess we will see. TTFN
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|At work (i currently work for Xerox on CentreWare development for Win32/64, Mac and *NIX platforms) and we have over 300 computers ranging from old 486's to Dual Xeons for testing. At home i also do private beta testing for companies and have 4 computers which are ONLY for testing, i have multiple ghost images of the machine in different states (SP1, SP2 etc.) in my opinion i think all testers who are serious about testing and are not just in it to get the software early will have a similar setup. Looks like i am agreeing with Fewt on this one :-/ (please dont hate me guys ;-P)
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|Hey: can we keep the comments here related to software
without getting personal here? See Beta News guidlines
directly above the Comments window! Personal attacks
don't belong here.
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|Excuse me, but no personal attck was involved at all.
The topic of the article was that McAfee had opened up their beta program to the public.
WindowsX made a comment abotu his participation in that beta program.
My response was also related to his participation in that program.
His comments above as well as his commnents below "I was commenting on the pre disposition that mcafee wants you to use their built in firewall with virus scan." show his lack of technical knowledge (not considering the technical issues of the incompatibility) and his obvious prejudice against McAfee (insisting that the limitation is purely artificial and forced).
Both make him an extremely poor choice for inclusion in any software Beta program. That is not a personal attack, it is a direct observation that is 100% on topic for this article (which is not about software as you claim, but is about the "McAfee Consumer Products beta program")
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|And where exactly is this "pre-disposition" that you claim documented anywhere?
The fact that there are still incompatibilities with a lot of software is normal for a Beta and is not any proof that "mcafee wants you to use their built in firewall with virus scan" as you claim.
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|Trying to install VirusScan Pro, you get the error "McAfee VirusScan Professional Edition has detected ZoneAlarm Pro on you computer. You must uninstall ZoneAlarm Pro before this installation can continue."
Hmm...I'll bet it gets along with McAfee Firewall...
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|This is what I hate about open Betas.
Here we have yet another example of someone who did not read the Release Notes before installing and quite probably will provide absolutely no useful feedback to McAfee.
Why do so many people think that the purpose of a Beta is so that they personally can "play" with the software early?
We get this all the time on applications to participate in our Betas. "Why are you a good candidate for inclusion in our Beta process?" "Because I want to take a look at your software and see how it will help me". And then they're surprised and offended when we reject them. Sigh.
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|***this post is based on my experiences*****
I sure hope McAfee is going to make the products (especially the AV product!) actually Work! I have personally seen "McAfee Protected" systems, after a full update of the AV engine and AV definitions, set to "scan all" find no virus at all. Then, I take that HD out, slave it to mine, and spend *2 HOURS* cleaning 3,000 infected files, and 8 seperate viruses from the same drive that was "clean" according to McAfee.
I sure hope they change the way things work!!! (And McAfee, make it easier to update the dang dat files, ok? Like Norton, PC-Cillan, and others, use a friendly auto-update!)
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|I have been using Mcafee Virus Scan 6,02 and it runs perfectLooking forward to 7
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|Try one thing (hope it works better for you than for the others that have done this): go to www.housecall.antivirus.com, do the free online scan, and see if anything is found. You can do the scan from the "don't register" link, and on dialup it may take 5 minutes to set up the AV engine and definitions.
Usually, there are infected files found when McAfee people do this.
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|Did that- Clean as usual
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|Lucky you, hehe. I have seen just the opposite.
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|Normally I go with Symantec products for AV\Security and the like. But McAfee does have one really excellent product called SpamKiller. I used to get between 3-5 spams in my mailbox every morning, and usually one or two more during the day. So I found Spamkiller and thought I'd give it a shot, and for the first few days I got what seemed triple the amount of spam. I kept the program and thought I'd wait a bit longer...
That was 3 weeks ago. Since then I've gotten probably 2 spams. This thing works excellent. It takes a little bit of time, but it really does work. The best feature is it can automatically send out errors to the spam originator. I didn't figure this would work, but I would attribute the decrease in spam (to being almost non-existant) to this feature.
Give it a go:
http://www.spamkiller.com
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|Sounds like a great product. Does it ever attempt to delete legit e-mail that it thinks is spam?
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|I've found the SuperDAT updates to be pretty simple :)
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|So far I haven't had that happen. Naturally it will happen at some point, but McAfee thought this through pretty well. SpamKiller only 'quarantines' email which fails the filters and are labeled spam. By default, quarantined mail is only really deleted after 30 days I believe. Quarantined mail can be recovered by a click of a button, and the email is sent back to the server for your email client.
Another nice feature is the ability to create your own filters in addition to the weekly filters which are auto-downloaded. You can filter by IP, message text, subject, etc.
I generally don't plug programs quite so blatantly, but anything that rids me of spam that effectively is a God-send in my book :)
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|James strange thing is i have never seen the problem that you speak if on the 30+ sites that i manage that have McAfee software, the one that i love the most is the groupshield software so i dont even have to worry about my users getting virus's
I havent had an email virus infect on of my sites since i have started migrating them over to McAfee.. I think you lucked out my friend
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|I don't know; maybe it is the level of "computer illiteracy" in this area, but every system with McAfee (all newer systems) havve bad infections. It *may* be that no one has ever changed McAfee to "scan ALL files" on auto and manual scans, or updating more than 0 times a year.
I really like the "set it and forget it" type that Norton does with 2002- right after install it is set to for auto and manual scan of all drives, with auto updates.
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|Jamwheat,
You dont know how much I appreciate that link you set.It's going to save me a heck of alot a time validating wether to complete or fail a HSD install.
Gotta love the free education from billboards;)
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|rkmurphy, glad to be of service! It is also refreshing to see a nice post too :)
You can contact me via email from my web site if you need any more help or ideas.
James Wheat
http://belprecomputerwizard.com
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|I personally have found the best antivirus (terms of removal detection and scanning speed)
It is computer associate's eztrust antivirus
You can trial it at www.my-etrust.com
Kaspersky would be a real nice piece of software if it actually got rid of the viruses. It says it did but rescan and the files are still there infected or so it was with the virus I had. it was registered.
but computer associates is what microsoft guards their network of computers with and its just fast as hell at scanning the files. It detects boot viruses , all unknown viruses, and all known viruses in its database. they have updates about every 2 days.
Its the best Have the behind the scenes monitorer and you will never save a virus on your computer it will be intercepted.
The program is great i had the wierd virus on my pc probably put there by a hacker it corrupted installation shield files among others and including explorer.exe corrupted kaspersky couldnt fix the virus all the way but eztrust did all 800 infected files. and by the way first aid by mcaffee sucks. i notice whatever titles the big companys touch turn to s***. first aid 98 was nice not owned by mcaffee but not 2000 owned by mcaffee. aol owns netscape and compuserve now compuserve classic = awesome and no errors compuserve 2000 4 5 6 and 7 by aol = s*** netscape 4.* not owned by aol good netscape 7 = s***
netscape 7's java is terrible one minute the applet is of a game go to a different program and go back to the window with the applet and its grey and u have to click between programs to get it back to normal its pretty much has java that freezes. im looking forward to preview release 2 of 7 hopefully their will be improvements.
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