It's interesting to see when a new anti-virus comes out how the product is streamlined, fast, unobtrusive and the emails are friendly.

As a few years go by they all tend to turn into 'marketing machines', they are no longer interested in making a good product, just a shiny one. And by 'shiny' I mean: colorful, bloated and slow.

Maybe the marketing people take control? Maybe they get bought up by the bigger companies? I really don't know.

I'm dreading the day I need to buy an AV for my mac :-/

Note: From around '97 on these were the AVs I used, I usually switched when the UI became too bloated:

- Norton

- McAfee

- F-prot ( was still fast last time I checked )

- Panda

- Avast

Imagine how I felt after I received an email from PayPal for a survey after I contacted their support. They had an option to do the survey anonymously, the url ended like this: ?survey_id=2294&user_id=[...]&anon=yes

I have to trust a company with my money while they include my user_id in "anonymous" data?

Have to use McAfee at big corporate day job. It's amazing how much faster a full-blown development environment runs on the same hardware when dual-booted into Linux.

Wow!! Really, WOW!!!!

I didn't realize any of this till I read the article. It is interesting to learn how your mind learns to block out such things after years of receiving such emails and ignoring them. We even learn to ignore an email just by reading the subject.

I once installed McAfee on a friend's computer, against my better judgement (he's a complete technophobe, had been sold it at some generic computer shop and been scared of installing it himself but sunk-investment and all that).

McAfee said the machine was clean, although it was still showing some suspicious, if not definitive, signs of being infected. Uninstalled McAfee, installed AVG free, and AVG found six viruses. Six. One I'd heard of, and I've no particular interest in this kind of thing. That's as damning a verdict as I've ever seen, in my book.

If I'd not have doubted McAfee, he'd have carried on with a false sense of security. McAfee is, and always has been, worse than nothing at all - at least with nothing at all, you know you're probably infected.

Ironically, your PC is probably safer without McAfee on your computer. McAfee has a reputation for being slow to get signatures out for new viruses, and for not playing well with Windows OS. With good, free alternatives available, I wouldn't recommend anyone use McAfee products.

Microsoft Security Essentials is free now, works at least as well as the other anti-virus programs, and doesn't get in your face about it.

If Microsoft had released it in 1999 instead of 2009, they wouldn't have Apple and Google nipping at their heels today. It's that simple.