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This latest release of McAfee's flagship product is not so different from its immediate predecessor, Office 2000 Pro. It now supports Windows Millennium Edition (although not Windows 2000) and the control panel has been tweaked, but there's no disguising that several of these utilities were developed in isolation from one another. Some of the cracks still show.
One new entry is McAfee Firewall, a program that prompts you for the nod whenever an application attempts to access the internet. It's neither the friendliest nor most flexible firewall around, but it will stop any rogue Trojans phoning home with your data. One quick click temporarily blocks all incoming and outgoing internet traffic.
Guard Dog is a more configurable program that prevents personal information being transmitted across the net without your express permission. During setup, you fill in any credit-card and contact details that you'd prefer to keep private, and thereafter Guard Dog pops up with a bark and a blocking screen whenever this information is typed into a chat window or website.
While it might stop Junior bidding away your fortune for a PlayStation 2, it's easy enough to slip most information through the hound's teeth if you have a mind to do so. Email messages are not monitored and, rather frustratingly, the 'zip code' field refuses to accept British postcodes.
The third security component is VirusScan, a perfectly acceptable if somewhat fiddly anti-virus program. We'd have liked to see Firewall, Guard Dog and VirusScan working closely together as variations on a theme, but they operate as standalone applications. Incidentally, if you were alarmed by reports of older versions of VirusScan slowing PCs to a snail's slither after taking online updates, be assured that this version should not have such problems.
PGP is on hand to securely encrypt emails. Moreover, you can set aside a slice of hard disk for storing sensitive files in encrypted form.
Uninstaller is just what you'd expect - a useful utility that keeps a beady eye on new program installations with a view to removing them cleanly at a later date.
One old 'favourite', the woefully inadequate troubleshooter First Aid, is still bundled here but now no longer trumpeted on the packaging. We tried the (allegedly) more powerful diagnostic tool Discover Pro instead but it merely froze our test system, while the ambitiously-named Crash Protector turned a blind eye to such troubles.
Another oldie, Oil Change - a utility that helps you update device drivers online - is mentioned in the manual but is nowhere to be found in the suite itself. References to the Year 2000 'problem' abound in the Help files, which is mildly amusing, but we really had to quibble with the inspired sloppiness that led to the presence of a Y2K countdown monitor.
Everything else that you'd expect from a utility suite is here - a Registry Wizard that cleans and optimises your system from the inside out, a disk defragmenter, an alternative to Scandisk, a zip manager, a file shredder - and all told it's pretty good value for £70.
But one's first impression upon installing McAfee Office is not so much 'great, that's my computer sorted' as 'good grief, why is everything so slow?' Or words to that effect. For this utility suite is heavy on those very system resources it's designed to optimise and protect.
Contact
Network Associates: 01753 217500; www.mcafee.com
See also:
All File & Disk Management
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