Security Suites Are Rife With Problems

If security software is so necessary in Windows -- as it is -- why are we supposed to pay extra for it?

For years, that's been a paradox Windows users have been able to mull over as they sat through installations of other companies' security software on their computers.

Symantec's and McAfee's security software programs have long benefited from Microsoft's oversights. Both firms supply the antivirus programs offered in trial form on most new PCs-- and which help advertise their full-fledged security suites.

But the 2006 editions of these suites --McAfee Internet Security Suite 2006, $50 as a download or $70 as a box for Win 98 or newer; Symantec's Norton Internet Security 2006, $70 for Win 2000 and XP -- look unworthy of that success.

For one thing, they face competition from Microsoft, which last year added effective firewall protection to Windows XP with its Service Pack 2 update and has since released a surprisingly good (though still in beta test) anti-spyware tool.

For another, the complexity of the Symantec and McAfee suites seems to cause them to fail in ugly and destructive ways, according to readers who have written in to complain about these problems week after month after year.

Most important, the latest McAfee and Symantec suites just don't work all that well.

Both excel only in their antivirus utilities-- which you can buy separately from these all-purpose bundles. Each program correctly blocked viruses received via e-mail in two different e-mail applications and via AOL's AIM instant-messenger software. Each also automatically fetched updates to its virus database every day.

Symantec's Norton AntiVirus, however, was quicker about its business, cleanly killing viruses with just brief notifications afterwards. Symantec's installer, unlike McAfee's, also scanned the computer for viruses before setting up the program, a sensible precaution.

McAfee VirusScan, meanwhile, asked what it should do every time it found a virus-- as if the choice should ever not be "delete." Downloading antivirus updates manually required setting Internet Explorer as the default browser, turning off pop-up blocking and accepting the installation of an ActiveX program from McAfee's site -- everything you shouldn't be in the habit of doing if you want to stay safe online.

Things get worse in the rest of the McAfee and Symantec suites.

Their firewalls, intended to stop worms from crawling onto your computers, offer no more protection against intrusions than the one in Win XP Service Pack 2. Their advantage comes if a program has already moved in, when they can stop it from communicating with its creators. But these firewalls first need to learn which ones are safe so as not to nag you about the harmless activity of legitimate software.