McAfee Total Protection Review

McAfee is a well-known name in the antivirus industry. McAfee Total Protection provides complete antivirus protection for your PC. It boasts additional features offering complete protection for not only your PC but Mac, tablet and even phone.

The McAfee Total Antivirus protection gives 1-year protection and can be bought for 3, 5, or 10 devices starting at $19.99. So, how does it fair in the current antivirus market? Is it worth your money? Let’s find out.

Quick Pros & Cons of McAfee Total Protection

While a good anti-virus program on its own, we need to consider McAfee compared to other products on the market. In this comparison, there are advantages and drawbacks, and it would be wise to consider those before your purchase.

Although for some the cons might be meaningless and the advantages priceless, for others the situation might be just the opposite.

If you want to protect all of the devices you have, especially when it comes to a company or a very large family, you might want to try the 2016 Total Protection for an unlimited number of devices. While the UI on this software is from 2016, all of the security features are updated for the current year.

McAfee Total Protection Review

McAfee Total Protection comes with many additional features. It offers password manager, secure file storage, multi-OS support, parental control, ransomware protection and much more. It offers a unique money-back guarantee where if your machine gets infected, the customer support at McAfee will try to remove the infection.

If they fail, you will get a full refund of the cost of your plan. However, there is a catch; you are only eligible if you have auto-renewal turned on.

Setup and installation

Installing McAfee Total Antivirus is easy. Once you receive the code through mail or download code, you start to download the free trial from their official website. Initially, you may have to wait for the download to be completed.

There are some occasions where the installer requires more time. In that case, you need to try to run the installer with administrative privileges. If you are still having problems, then we recommend connecting with McAfee’s support team, or you can try other troubleshooting tools that are provided on their website.

Once installed, input your license key in the settings tab, and you are good to go.

Interface

The interface of the McAfee Total Protection went through some changes in 2019. The original interface lacked a sense of importance or urgency and the home screen was missing vital information.

However, it now offers some information that includes how many apps, web connections and PC tasks it is protecting. The home screen will ask you to install their other included apps, and you can decide which one you want to use.

You can find more information/options if you click the settings cog icon. There you will find a list of tools easily accessible to you.

Overall, it is a decent interface that needs another upgrade to improve user experience. The good news is that they update their antivirus periodically without any additional fees, and you may see an updated, user-friendly interface in the future.

Features

McAfee Total Protection is packed with lots of features highlighting proper antivirus protection. This means that you can do Full System scan, Quick Scan or scan custom areas of your computer. Moreover, the auto-scan is initiated when you plug-in an external device such as a pen drive or an external hard disk.

The scan times are average, but you might have to wait longer if your USB device contains thousands of files.

The settings cog icon contains many options to play with. One of the significant features of McAfee Total Protection is the Vulnerability Scanner. It runs in the background and ensures that your machine is free of any threats during regular operation.

Its two key components include the antivirus scanner and email/web protection. The antivirus scanner is popular among the antivirus community and is a top-tier signature-based scanner. The email scanner ensures that your email downloads don’t contain any infection.

Scheduled scans are also part of the McAfee Total Protection. Once you boot up the antivirus software for the first time, you will be greeted with the scheduled scans. You can set up Viruses, Out-of-Date apps, and Cookies & trackers scan times.

Firewall protection is also provided within the McAfee Total Protection. It works in the background and automatically makes intelligent decisions. You can also configure a connection through the Firewall option including the ability to open or close ports, make application custom rules, and so on. The only downside is that you may have to search more thoroughly to find those options.

The interface is not user-friendly which makes things a lot harder. Lastly, the Firewall uses an Intrusion Detection system with two options: Basic and High.

When you first open the McAfee Total Protection, it also installs a browser extension, McAfee WebAdvisor. It keeps you safe from online phishing or malicious website by warning you before you enter a website that exhibits malicious symptoms.

There are other features are also worth mentioning. For example, you also get access to a file encryption tool and a spam filter. These are not installed by default, and you download them manually from the application interface.

Performance Optimization and Password Manager

Unlike other antivirus solutions, McAfee Total Protection comes with a PC Boost option. The PC boost option consists of two major components including App Boost and Web Boost. The App Boost optimizes the I/O and CPU by prioritizing the foreground apps. Even when turned on, we didn’t see any change in terms of performance.

However, the company claims that it can make a PC faster up to 36%. The Web Boost, on the other hand, stops videos from playing automatically. These save you some performance but may hamper your browsing experience.

Password Manager is another useful feature. It enables you to store the password with multi-factor protection.

Protection

We found McAfee Total Protection work as intended in our tests. It also has a good reputation when it comes to protecting machines against third-party malicious actors. The Total Protection from McAfee is also equipped to handle the latest threats including ransomware protection.

Final Verdict

McAfee Total Protection is a complete package that helps you stay safe when connecting any external devices such as pen drive or external hard disk or the internet. The only downside is its interface which we think needs an upgrade for improved user experience.

At just $19.99, we recommend McAfee Total Protection. You can also look at the five or ten device packages if you are looking to protect all the devices at your home.