Most enthusiasts view McAfee as just another resource hog often found in OEM systems alongside perfomancepillaging bloatware. Fair assessment or not, this is the perception McAfee’s up against in trying to win over the PC elite. It helps that the company isn’t blissfully unaware of the importance placed on perfomance; its latest edition promises to raise the bar with a more efficient engine that won’t drag your system down.

In our testing, McAfee fell in the middle of the pack instead of leading the charge. RAM consumption crept above what we’d consider lean, and while scanning for malware, CPU utilization often hovered around 40 percent. That in itself isn’t criminal, but we felt swindled when all it bought us was the second- slowest scan time of the bunch-although, remarkably, we didn’t see much of a drop in gaming or day-to-day computing perfomance.

McAfee’s list of features ranges in practicality from beneficial to the unlikely to ever be used. Occupying the former camp are spyware protection., a highly configurable firewall, e-mail and IM guards, basic parental controls, and a file shredder. But we just can’t get stoked about the virus map, which displays global viral hot spots, or the HackerWatch module,which looks for patterns of attack around the world to report to ISPs. And still other  feauters, like Active Protection for real –time safeguards, will be made available only through future updates-boo!

Living up to its name, McAfee Total Protection 2009 proved a formidable adversary against all types of malware and even stopped malicious  websites from loading. We also dig McAfee’s SiteAdvisor tool, which not only identifies questionable search results but also gives a detailed report n why the URL is suspect . But no matter how good it protects, we’re not willing to endure slow scanning perfomance or wait for features that should have been available at release.

McAfee Total Protection 2009 3-User