Upgrade to McAfee Internet Security 7?

Its a matter of personal choice. If you have the fully paid up version of McAfee's Internet Security and you are, or have been, very happy with the level of protection it gives you, then you may think it is worth while keeping it, and paying the extra for the upgrade. I find that such suites increase their features gradually over a period of time to match new threats, or changing performance, styles, etc.

All of these protection products have their good points and "not so good" points, and McAfee is certainly one of the world leaders in the field. However, many people here, me included, do not particularly like suites that try to do everything. My personal point of view is that such suites are bloated and cumbersome, and the individual components can sometimes conflict with each other. So we tend to go for smaller individual programs, which we can run ourselves when we want, and not rely on these comprehensive suites to do everything for us in the background.

But, many will prefer just that sort of program suite. One that encompasses all, so they can relax and let the program do all of the hard work without too much intervention from them.

It's what you prefer really.

For what it's worth, this is what I use;

1 - ZoneAlarm - Firewall - free, but I brought the Pro version
2 - AVG6 - Free Antivirus, but must soon change to AVG7.
3 - Ad-Aware SE Personal - Anti Adware
4 - Spybot Search & Destroy - Anti-spyware
5 - SpywareBlaster - Compliments Spybot
6 - Start-up-Monitor - Stops pesky things registering to start up without me knowing

For Internet browing (as IE is now considered not very safe), I use;

1 - Netscape 7.1 - Old but I still like the GUI
2 - Firefox - A recent convert, but still evaluating it
3 - IE 6 - Only for Windows updates
4 - Netscape Messenger - For email. I don't yet have a need to change to Thunderbird

Password protection program I use;

5 - Whisper - Password contol


Belarc advisor - Doesn't fit into anything else. Great for all of your system info, product ID's etc. I keep a print handy.

All of these have free versions, which are fully functional.

Hope this helps

Mark

If you want my opinion, you should put the money towards something more useful.

First off, ditch McAfee's anti-virus program. It's a resource hog. It can consume up to 40% of your bandwidth scanning files. Download a copy of AVG Free instead. Not as many features, but it does everything the average person needs, and it's free. It's also much easier on the resources.

Secondly, if you feel you need a firewall, invest in a router with a firewall. I kind of prefer Linksys stuff, now that their firmware's are based on Linux. I've had a lot of bad experiences with D-Link stuff recently, and doubt I'll ever buy something from them again, and Netgear has long had a reputation for making shoddy products.