I am running McAfee Security Centre 2004 on my PC and simply don’t trust the thing. It consits of ViursScan, Firewall, Privacy Service and SpamKiller. I am not bothered about the Spam thing, don’t get much anyway as my provider takes out most of it already. However, I am not sure if the remaining three services are covered by Avast Home/Prof Edition. I believe it does not cover the Firewall. What about the others? If it does not cover all areas, what typical configuration do you suggest do PC end-users to have the highest level of protection against Viruses, external attacks at port level and Spyware? Anything else I should be aware of?
I would suggest apart from avast use a firewall (plenty of free or paid ones out there) plus spywareblaster to stop malware being downloaded and maybe MS Antispy 'cos that has onguard protection. Those are the only items I use and fingers crossed have had no virus or major malware problems. Other programmes to use as occasional scan as opposed to resident are Adaware and spybot. ZA has a few conflicts with avast but there are plenty of threads on this forum about them. But your best and first line of defence is avast and webshield… And finaly WELCOME…
I use to have McAfee Security Center, if you want to keep the firewall, make sure you don’t play around with the program access too much or it won’t allow the program to access the internet. If your planning to use avast! antivirus, withdraw the McAfee Viruscan. Enjoy.
If it is possible to uninstall the AV element of McAfee (not just disable it) then it may be possible to use avast for anti-virus protection.
I’m not sure if the Privacy element is anything like Zone Alarms privacy settings which has been causing conflict with avast’s web shield (blocking cookies, etc. you may have to lower the settings).
You may have to integrate the SpamKiller with avast (email scanner) if it uses a proxy to filter email before they get to the inbox.
