Do you remember the time when a virus scanner alone could protect your computer? Well, those days have long gone and, to make it even more apparent, McAfee has grouped all of its home security products into just one bundle. That’s not to say virus scans aren’t important any more: the antivirus package still forms the core of this suite, but now it’s backed up by anti-hacker tools (Personal Firewall Plus), anti-abuse tools (Privacy Service), and anti-spam tools (SpamKiller). Behind the brand names, Internet Security Suite also blocks spyware and adware, strips out pop-up adverts, filters unsavoury content and even auto-cleans any document trails left behind.

With the recent release of Microsoft Windows XP SP2, you’d be forgiven for wanting to re-evaluate how useful these features are: Microsoft went to great lengths to secure Windows XP by adding the improved firewall and the Windows Security Center. You may think that McAfee would have taken the hint and gone along with Redmond’s multi-billion dollar security initiative. However, the first thing that pops up after installing this product is a recommendation that you disable the Windows Security Center and use McAfee’s Security Center instead. This could either be a very smart or a very dumb move – we think it falls into the latter category. We’ve gone to a lot of effort here at PC Plus (and also in our sister titles, PC Answers, PC Format, and Windows XP: The Official Magazine) towards educating users about how to use the new Windows Security Center and the Windows Firewall, and having McAfee replace all that with its own version just doesn’t make sense. At the risk of receiving some warnings twice, we opted to keep both the Windows Security Center and the McAfee Security Center running, and it seemed to work without a hitch.

We’ll break it to you up front: virus scanning with Internet Security Suite 2005 is as slow as it ever was, which means scanning your whole computer is still worthy of a long coffee break. Fortunately, it picks up a wider range of targets than it has ever done before, including most spyware, which means that, as long as you can live with the constant threat-mongering inherent in antivirus applications, it will actually serve you well. The McAfee Security Center proves its usefulness by automatically downloading and installing virus scan updates, which is one less thing to you have to worry about.

Personal Firewall is largely invisible, as you might hope. When an application needs to connect to the Internet, a small warning box flies out from the right-hand side of the screen, giving you the choice of either allowing or denying its access. The box is quite intrusive, but the advice given is straightforward and to the point. We particularly like the advice given for Microsoft Outlook: “Outlook has a long history of significant security lapses.” Still, it’s good to see ISS integrated into the program, so it was at least as protected as it could be.

Toys and tricks
20 minutes later, our virus scan has shuffled forward to the start of our Program Files directory. We’re already wondering whether this Athlon 64-based system will have enough power to run ISS 2006! In the meantime, we can look at what many consider to be the future of security products: eye candy. In the same way that medical hypochondriacs like to page through medical dictionaries looking for the latest illness they might have, technology hypochondriacs have the furnace of their fears amply fuelled in ISS 2005 through a number of extra features.

On the firewall front, you get a ‘Test my Firewall’ scanner and a fancy ‘Track an Attack’ tool that graphically traces the route between your computer and any other IP address in the world. They’re all neat little toys, but they offer very little value.

Of course, what these features do is make the user feel like they’re totally in control, and to that extent, they work well. McAfee’s mature and expansive virus scan and firewall products confirm a feeling of security. By default, the entire system runs by the ‘install updates first, tell me later’ rule, which makes it a system equally as useful for power users as it is for home bods.