I purchased Virus Scan within a McAfee product called Student Survival Kit because I wanted to protect my computer from viruses. Unfortunately, I found the instructions for installation incomplete and the screen messages during installation inconsistent. There was no mention of needing a large capacity disk system or a writable CD rom for backing up data.

Once installed, the Compression Agent insisted on compressing the data on my hard drive and partitioning off my drive. This took, literally, about four hours. When all this was accomplished, I discovered that although I could get online and read my email, normal Internet access was excruciatingly SLOW.

There is supposed to be free 30 day support. The number is not toll free and I tried four times to call and was on hold for long periods of time. I used the email support at the McAfee site and got three different (wrong) answers about how to correct the problem.

When I tried to remove the software, I got messages telling me that "access was denied." I was having to go to the public library to get online and do any productive work. Finally, today at the library I got someone live at the support chat who told me (correctly) to put my computer into safe mode before attempting to uninstall this software.

What a relief to have it off! I was immediately able to access the Internet in a timely manner. What about the money spent? I'll probably have to just forfeit it, despite the fact that I cannot use Virus Scan.

Recommended: No