topic Re: McAfee slows down the pc in Plusnet Feedback

McAfee slows down the pc

ashley247 — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:43:36 GMT

I recently tried the Mcafee software and my pc was very slow indeed ! I reverted back to Avast and its running much faster like before. I will try McAfee again maybe with a fresh install of XP. Out of the free anti-viruses available i found Avast the fastest.

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

avatastic — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 13:54:01 GMT

I use Microsoft Security Essentials and common sense* whilst browsing.
If my system is acting quirky I'll throw MalwareBytes Anti-malware at it.
I recommend Sophos to the students and staff at work, because our license for it covers anyone with network access, be they staff, student, faculty.
(Why do they call it "common sense" if its so rare?)

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

Gus — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 14:45:27 GMT

Other other, I know Mcafee's and its clone Norton's past so would never use either.

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

Paulg78 — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 23:09:36 GMT

I personally like Zone alarm with Antivirus , an absolutely cracking bit of software but I fine this Plusnet protect software but McAfee not too bad, I've got it on my Samsung N130 notebook along with my other 2 laptops and Desktop, all seems to be pretty good

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

gswindale — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 13:39:02 GMT

Interestingly I've not found a performance issue with it, so cannot vote as the question "have you had to revert to another AV product?" is missing the "no" option.
I have found that it has never completed a full scan of my PC due to the amount of data on the hard drives.

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

barr1941 — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 15:55:42 GMT

To Ashley247, I thought I would just tell you I once installed McAfee on a pc I had a few years ago, it was a desk top and not only did it run slow, it
stopped it completely, I had to get it rebuilt by my computer chap who has a degree in that field, and he advised me never to use that or Norton
again as he had done another that had used that one , and that was worse than mine. Jim Barr

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

MakeTeaNotWar — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 17:28:58 GMT

McAfee and Norton are notorious for causing performance issues both at home and in business environments, It's a bit irrelevant for those replying here saying "I've not had a problem", that's great for you but the OP has!
Personally I use Avast at home, it's got some very clever features, performs solidly on the antivirus bench marks in both detection rates and performance (it has a clever technology called persistent cache, where it learns to trust key files, dlls etc...)
An alternative to Avast that I've used and a few others have suggested is Microsoft Security Essentials, I saw it cause havoc with my parents computer running XP but it ran a treat on my Windows 7 machine, the only two things I didn't like were that it could be a bit overly sensitive on some websites and it was overly simple, I don't trust anything if I can't actually see what it's doing...
Check out this site for impartial comparative AV tests that measure performance in detection rates... http://www.av-comparatives.org/en/comparativesreviews

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

dvorak — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:40:44 GMT

I don't use any.

Re: McAfee slows down the pc

gswindale — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 09:41:31 GMT

Quote from: MakeTeaNotWar
McAfee and Norton are notorious for causing performance issues both at home and in business environments, It's a bit irrelevant for those replying here saying "I've not had a problem", that's great for you but the OP has!

I was posting a response to the poll just pointing out that not everybody has a problem with it and so would not need to revert to anything else. The way the question was phrased was poor.
If it had been written
"for those experiencing performance problems with McAfee; what A/V product did you revert to?" then I would not have commented as I'm not in that category.