McAfee Total Protection 2010: Photo gallery

McAfee is another member of a growing trend of programs to completely ignore the installation media and proceed directly to downloading the product. At least there is the option to use the CD though.

Scanning the PC for threats is even included in the installation.

Once the downloading, scanning and further downloads are complete, the installation onto the hard drive finally begins. Here you can see the components of the software suite.

Being a security suite, having the product phone home is encouraged by the company.

Online activation is another staple of security suites.

As is the need to create an account with the vendor.

Once installation is complete, this is the opening screen of the product.

Updating the product takes place in the background with no feedback to speak of other than the icon in the taskbar.

The network manager is able to label network peers as friend or intruder.

Computer maintenance consists of defragmenting the hard drive and removing unneeded files and registry entries. The task scheduler only allows scheduling of the defragmenter and QuickClean utilities. The defragmenter used is the standard Windows defragmenter.

With one button, you can make the outside world truly go away.

McAfee's modularity allows various parts of the program to be turned off depending on your needs.

The suite offers buffer overflow protection as well as standard virus scanning options.

Interesting that there is such a thing as a trusted buffer overflow.

Firewall options are similar to options found in most firewall products.

The ease with which to create spam rules is a nice feature.

Instant Messaging also gets the scanning treatment.

McAfee says it can protect personal information from being transmitted over the internet without the user's permission.

When files just need to disappear forever and be unrecoverable, the Shredder comes into play.

System Restore launches the Windows System Restore utility.

An activity map of McAfee's HackerWatch shows global threat activity.

A visual trace-route utility makes an appearance.

The virus map option launches a map from McAfee.com, notice that the McAfee SiteAdvisor bar in Internet Explorer is also installed.

But the McAfee bar isn't completely mundane, and will prompt you to try to install the Yahoo Toolbar as well. I was not particularly pleased about this behaviour.