Review: McAfee Internet Security Suite 2008

Spyware, spam and phishing are all designed to mess up your computer, waste your time, and in the worst cases transmit personal data stolen from your PC to another computer.

It's possible to defeat all these intruders by installing the right kind of protective programs, and provided you keep them up to date you can surf and compute in complete safety.

McAfee Internet Security Suite 2008 makes this easy by combining its well-proven anti-virus software with all the other protective utilities users could possibly need.

The benefits are that you save time by installing all the essential safeguards in one go, and that these are then accessible through a single control panel. Furthermore, a single daily update keeps them all working at peak efficiency without any work.

Some users object to programs taking over their computers by running scheduled updates that slow everything else down, and in the past McAfee's programs have been guilty of this behaviour, but with Internet Security Suite the problem seems to have been nailed.

The program is now quietly updated every day without bothering the user, and instead of being run at a fixed time the updating process is put off for a quiet time. During our test period we were unaware of updates having taken place until the program told us it had made them.

The default settings protect users who know nothing about internet threats and are happy to leave everything to the program, but for those prepared to dig a little deeper there are several hidden goodies.

One of these is a set of parental controls through which individual users of the PC can have their browsing restricted to either safe sites deemed appropriate for their ages or to a list of sites chosen by the parents.

A backup tool provides users of Windows XP with similar facilities to those built into Windows Vista, while for every Windows user there's a vault in which passwords can be stored, protected by a single master password.

A privacy protection filter prevents any personal data designated by the user from being transmitted over the Internet without permission, but it's a shame that McAfee did not internationalise this feature, which is tailored for American users.

Included with the suite (but not part of it) is McAfee Site Advisor. If you choose to install this along with rest of the suite it hooks into your favourite web browser and uses a traffic-light warning system to indicate whether the sites you visit are safe, iffy or dangerous. The ratings are retrieved from a constantly updated list held on McAfee's own site.