McAfee Antivirus - Any good?

[Marvin]

Hi! As part of my ISP service with Bell Canada, I get free McAfee antivirus. I was wondering if anyone uses this and if it's any good?
I know in the past there were problems with the big name Antivirus companies, namely Norton basically taking over your computer with no real option to uninstall.

Is McAfee worth downloading? I currently use Microsoft Security Essentials by its self.

Thank you for any and all replies!

[Darkn3ss F4lls]

No,

my experience is none of the big names are good, that they all use the same methods of searching out new virus'. Their databases are roughly similar, yet I've never had problems with Avast free, and if you place it on a machine running Norton for example it immediately finds files[not in the Norton directory's] that Norton has been jut ignoring and saying your computer is safe. This is just my experience with this, i'm sure some of the IT pros with more experience may have other experiences.

[Mokona512]

Mcafee is one of the worst, I deal with it regularly when working with store bought laptops (part of the preinstalled bloat). Pretty much a resource hog and very naggy.

To see if you are okay with it, I recommend trying it in a virtual machine first.

[Murrder]

I agree with others that Mcafee is probably one of the worst anti virus software packages on the market.

[Marvin]

Thank you all very much for the replies. I won't be downloading it then after all :) I thought maybe because it was free for me it might be worth it, but you have great points about it that make it not worth it at all.

[Adapt1ve]

For an Antivirus program I use Avast, though that program is starting to be intrusive so I will probably be switching to BitDefender. You should also think about getting Malwarebytes. Its free and removes malware other programs miss. Anytime I have something going on with my system, this program usually solves the issue.

http://www.bitdefender.com/
https://www.malwarebytes.org/

[Mokona512]

I recommend checking if you have an old hard drive laying around, and then install an extra copy of windows on it, then install multiple virus scanners (be sure to disable the startup items and auto protection of each to prevent stability issues).

The detection engine on mcafee is decent, it is just everything else around it that is the problem. Having a number of scanners is useful if you do something like recover a bunch of data from someones hard drive, and want to have multiple virus scanners perform a full scan before you begin restoring their data. If you are okay with doing a fresh install, you can also use a wide range of free trials from a number of virus scanners.

[Rixxan]

NEVER use mcafee. My parents had a laptop with it that two types of malware both hijacked mcafee. I switched to Avast free and Malwarebytes for an occasional scan and haven't had problems sence.