McAfee has for many years been one of the major players in the antivirus software market. With unscrupulous individuals creating computer viruses at alarming rates with devastating consequences, virus protection is more necessary than ever.

McAfee’s Virus Scan provides substantial protection to system, email and downloaded files as long as the virus definitions and scan engines are updated regularly.

Manual scanning of any drive, folder or file may be executed through the Viruscan option under the Network Associates menu under Program Files. The options to scan compressed files and subfolders may be selected/deselected here. You may also choose to scan all files or only program files ( those of certain extensions ). The “Extensions” button provides a list of customizable suffixes to the end user. These are all available under the “What & Where” tab.

The “Action” tab yields a list of what the program should do when it encounters a virus. The choices are “Prompt user for action”, “Move infected files automatically”, “Clean infected files automatically”, “Delete infected files automatically” or “Continue scanning.” By default, “Prompt user for action” is selected and recommended.

The “Report” tab allows for displaying a message, sounding an alert and logging the events. The user has a choice in placing the log and determining its maximum size.

There is an icon in the system tray to indicate McAfee’s presence. A right click on this icon yields “Status”, “Properties”, “Quick Enable”, “About” and “Exit” options. The status option allows the user to enable or disable scanning in any of the following four areas: System Scan, E-mail Scan, Download Scan and Internet Filter. The properties option allows the user to determine what files are scanned, when they are scanned, where to scan (floppies, network drives…etc.) or whether or not the user can cancel a scan. These are only the properties on the “Detection” tab.

The “Action” tab here gives the user several options for how the software responds when it encounters a virus. This is more functional than the “Action” tab previously discussed with regard to running a manual scan. With regard to the offending file(s), McAfee will execute one of the following actions: “clean”, “move”, “delete”, “stop access” or “exclude file.” The user may either be prompted to confirm such action or the software will proceed automatically.

The “Alert” tab allows the program to contact an individual (“Alert Manager”) when a virus is detected. One may also configure custom messages here and also allow an audible alert to sound upon virus detection.

The “Report” tab provides several logging options as presented earlier. The only difference here is that the user gets a choice of what to log: “virus detection”, “virus cleaning”, “infected file deletion”, “infected file move”, “session setting”, “session summary”, “date and time” and “user name.”

The “Exclusion” tab merely allows the user to omit virus scanning from a designated folder or group of folders.

A right click on the shield icon also give the user the useful “About” option. This is where you would go to find the serial number of the product, the virus definition number and date and the scan engine version. This will indicate whether or not you need to upgrade the virus definitions and in some cases the scan engine.

McAfee Virus Scan also comes with the familiar scheduler. This is also present as a separate icon running in the system tray. With the scheduler one may set automatic updates of virus definitions and automatic upgrades of scan engines. You can either point to and ftp site or a local server to obtain these vital upgrades. Automatic definition updates through this version of the scheduler will reload virus protection when complete, unlike earlier McAfee schedulers. Other tasks may also be scheduled with the options to run “at startup”, “hourly”, “daily”, “weekly” or “monthly.” There is even the option to randomize within a given hour that the user sets. This is particularly useful in a business or public setting where a large number of computers may attempt to run a scheduled task at the same time.

Overall, McAfee Virus Scan is stable and reliable. McAfee has also managed to fix some of the shortcomings of earlier renditions of the software. This version seems to function well on all windows platforms (9x/ME, NT, or 2000). I have not yet experienced the software on Windows XP. McAfee also supports its virus scan products for longer periods of time than Norton, its closest competitor. It also seems to uses fewer system resources than Norton Antivirus as well. I would recommend this package to defend ones personal or corporate computers.


Recommended: Yes