McAfee for Tablets - Worth it for a Fiver?

lawrie28

Evening All!

I recently purchased a Samsung 7" tab from Pcworld (pricematch and cashback= Very good deal!) and they offered me a copy of McAfee for Tablets for just £5 for 12 months.

I wasn't expecting this, so bought it on the grounds I can return it if I change my mind.

So, Is it worth the £5 for 12 months, or is there a better option or a cheaper option?

Thanks for your input.

Lum

If it's anything like McAfee for Windows, you'd have to pay me to install it and even then I'd only install it on a device I didn't intend to ever use.

Johnmcl7

I agree with the comment above as I wouldn't install McAfee by choice on anything, it doesn't seem to have improved at all since Intel's purchase.

As far as I'm aware the main malware threat to Android is through applications manually installed by the user so I'd recommend caution when installing applications from Google play in particular the permissions the application require - if it seems to need more permissions than you think it should then don't install it. Google are meant to be scanning the market themselves for malicious applications but they don't catch everything.

John

lawrie28

Lum wrote: »

If it's anything like McAfee for Windows, you'd have to pay me to install it and even then I'd only install it on a device I didn't intend to ever use.

Straight to the point - my kind of answer. Thanks

lawrie28

Johnmcl7 wrote: »

I agree with the comment above as I wouldn't install McAfee by choice on anything, it doesn't seem to have improved at all since Intel's purchase.

As far as I'm aware the main malware threat to Android is through applications manually installed by the user so I'd recommend caution when installing applications from Google play in particular the permissions the application require - if it seems to need more permissions than you think it should then don't install it. Google are meant to be scanning the market themselves for malicious applications but they don't catch everything.

John

This is the assumption i had come to but wanted a second opinion. I shall be returning to get my fiver back!

Backbiter

I've run McAfee on my home PC and laptop for several years and have never had a virus, so it suits me (it comes free with my BT Infinity broadband). I know it (like Norton) gets a big thumbs down from people with far more knowledge than me, but I suspect a lot of them have avoided it for so long they have little actual experience of using it.

mazza111

From one that's used it a long time ago, who was very naive and noobish. I found it was quite good for pcs.... Then when I started getting into gaming and using scripts for Mirc, I seen all the false positives it threw up along with the system resources it used. So haven't used it for many years now.

Haven't seen the one for tablets, but knowing now what I didn't know then. I wouldn't touch it either

Johnmcl7

Backbiter wrote: »

I've run McAfee on my home PC and laptop for several years and have never had a virus, so it suits me (it comes free with my BT Infinity broadband). I know it (like Norton) gets a big thumbs down from people with far more knowledge than me, but I suspect a lot of them have avoided it for so long they have little actual experience of using it.

Actually I've administered McAfee on several thousand PCs and run it along a similar number of machines running a different AV product. It's also been bundled on a lot of the home machines I've purchased so I'd say I have pretty good experience with it. I haven't come across any other AV product that tends to do more damage to the PC than malware (although some of the old Norton products could wreak havoc at times as well) frequently fails to catch malware and picks up so many false positives.

I bought a new machine last week that came with it preinstalled and it was like someone had taken a shotgun to my network stack, it completely failed and had left remnants of itself all over the system. It took a bit of time particularly as I couldn't get online with the machine for solutions but I did manage to cleanse it eventually and get the machine working, other people with the same machine had exactly the same problem as mine so it wasn't a one off. Hence I wouldn't let it near any of my machines regardless of the cost.

John

Lum

I too used to administer a McAfee deployment. I didn't have any choice in the matter as this was determined by the IT overlords at head office.

I would regularly have to clean PCs using alternative products such as the offline version of Windows Defender, or I'd just reformat them and start again if the user was ok with it being wiped.

The one lasting memory I have is a time when, on a Windows 2003 server, a whole bunch of scanned images that were due to be processed and archived started randomly disappearing. It turned out that McAfee was attempting to scan them but most of the time it would time out and give up. On the odd occasion where it was able to complete the scan of these TIF images it decided that they were some MS-DOS virus from 1994 that it could not clean so it just deleted them.

Late last year the IT overlords decided that we would switch to Symantec Endpoint (basically the corporate version of Norton) and while it still manages to annoy me regularly due to terrible management tools, enormous sized definition updates and making our PCs run like crap, it does seem to actually catch stuff without any false positives.

I've not had to clean or wipe a PC in a year, so while I still wouldn't let a Norton product near my own PCs, I am so grateful we have it instead of McCrappy.

GunJack

If it's android-based, Avast now do a version for it, so go look there

almillar

Urgh, I was in PCWorld buying a Nexus7 at the weekend there and was advised to buy Norton on some similar deal. Waste of time and they're just trying to squeeze more money out of unsuspecting customers. I was advised that because Android is Open Source there are lots of bad Apps for it. I wouldn't trust Norton to find any bad apps for starters, but really, what a load of dung.