McAfee Antispyware 2005

This is the first release of McAfee’s antispyware product, and frankly it shows. The
standard McAfee Security Center is installed along with the application, but it doesn’t actually provide a link to launch the antispyware product, which you have to do from the desktop or the Start button.

We’re unsure of the wisdom of relying on an Active X control to manage updates; clicking update launched our default browser, Opera, which was unable to do anything with the URL it was passed. We had to fire up our spyware-infested
copy of IE and paste the correct address into that – hardly confidence inspiring.

Once we were over that hurdle, however, performance wasn’t too bad; scanning was slower than some, but much better than the worst on test. Antispyware 2005 found an impressively long list of 22 problems, covering all our main annoyances, and it said it had fixed them all too. We certainly had no pop-up ads after restarting, but we still had a hijacked home page, and some – though not all – of the extra IE toolbars.

A second scan found that 10 of the original 22 items were still present, in one form
or another. We’d rather have been told removal wasn’t 100 per cent successful, than finding out ourselves when we scanned again.