Review: McAfee Total Protection Beta Takes On Windows Live OneCare

With Microsoft grabbing recent headlines on the release of its Windows Live OneCare product, established players in the Windows security and utilities market are taking action to show that they can hold their ground. On the same day that Microsoft announced the availability of OneCare, McAfee responded by starting the beta test program for its next generation of products, code-named "Falcon."

McAfee's Total Protection provides an extensive set of features that go beyond security to offer data protection and system maintenance. Click image to enlarge.

According to McAfee, it will eventually release four security suites, the first two of which are now available as downloadable betas. McAfee Total Protection is built on previous McAfee products such as VirusScan and Personal Firewall but adds new features to deal with emerging threats such as phishing. McAfee VirusScan Plus offers a subset of Total Protection's features dealing with virus, spyware, or hacker activity. I downloaded and installed the Total Protection beta to see how it holds up.

A Plethora Of Features
To call Total Protection just a security product shortchanges some of its features. It certainly offers the anti-virus, anti-spyware, and software firewall features that are typical of most PC security suites. However, it also adds anti-spam and anti-phishing features for e-mail and instant messaging. A wireless security component helps to ensure that your wireless network isn't penetrated or used by freeloaders. Parental control offers some peace of mind to parents who want to make sure their kids don't end up in the wrong Internet neighborhoods.

Most of Total Protection's features can be accessed through the main Security Center application, which provides an at-a-glance indication of the status of all the features. From there you can also configure each component or explore its operational details. Even using Security Center as a home base, there is so much functionality in the product that it's sometimes difficult to find or tweak specific settings. The interface requires a lot of "drill down and resurface" action to explore.

One of the best additions to McAfee's suite is Site Advisor, which it recently purchased from the developers. This browser add-on for Internet Explorer or Firefox checks the sites you visit against the information Site Advisor has collected about malicious downloads, spam, and relationships with other, possibly unsavory, sites. At the moment, Site Advisor is also available as a separate (non-beta) download, and it's worth the effort.

Backup And Restore
Another new feature, a data backup and restore application, can back up to local CD/DVD drives, separate partitions on the same drive, a USB hard drive, or to a local network drive. In addition, there is an Internet backup feature that saves files to a McAfee Web site. The site provides up to 1 GB of online storage with the option to purchase additional space, but the purchase option and pricing are not available during the beta period. By default, the backup saves only the files in the My Documents directory, but an Explorer-like interface lets you add other folders to be saved.

Beyond just security, Total Protection also simplifies access to several system maintenance tasks. It includes junk file cleanup, removal of privacy-related data such as auto-complete data or browser cookies, and a registry cleaner. There is even a file shredder to securely delete files so that they can't be retrieved by undelete utilities. An Internet traffic monitor screen provides a real-time view of data being sent and received. Some of these are only accessible from an "Advanced" menu view that is not the default; many users may never even see these features unless McAfee improves the interface.

Assessing The Beta
During my testing with Total Protection, the product usually managed to stay out of the way and appear only when something serious was afoot. I found Site Advisor to be a particularly useful and well-designed feature because it provided some real-time guidance about the trustworthiness of the sites I visited without being too distracting during normal Web browsing.

The software firewall component still has the same drawback that nearly every software firewall shares: incomprehensible messages. Even as an advanced user, I was left scratching my head about some of the messages that the firewall displayed about network access and registry changes. Less technical users will have no clue about what action to take when one of these messages appears.

Since McAfee's products are still in beta -- relatively early beta at that -- a lot may change before they ship. Even at this point, though, it's clear that Total Protection will offer significantly more maturity than Microsoft's OneCare, which is a sparsely-featured Version 1.0 product at this point. It appears that the price you'll pay for McAfee's beefy feature set is complexity, unless the user interface gets serious fine-tuning during its beta test period.

The beta is available for public download and evaluation at http://beta.mcafee.com.