Product: VirusScan 5.02
Company: McAfee
Website: http://www.mcafee.com
Estimated Street Price: $39.95
Review By: Julien JAY

FirstAid 2000

FirstAid was originally created by CyberMedia and bought by Network Associates, which helped make this software evolve. The aim of FirstAid 2000 is to protect, repair, and fix your computer of any errors FirstAid may find. FirstAid 2000 comes with a brand new nice interface based on the Microsoft Internet Explorer engine. However the speed of this GUI is too slow when running on old computers. When you launch FirstAid 2000 a desktop is shown with a lot of computer hardware: simply click the check buttons and FirstAid will check all of your hardware and software to find errors. Once the scan is complete a report is displayed and you can choose to let FirstAid repair and fix the registry errors it has found, optimize the hard disk, optimize the Windows settings, and suggest to you a workaround to fix any drivers' potential errors. But FirstAid 2000 will only launch ScanDisk or Defrag to repair the hard disk: it doesn't come with its own hard drive tools - too bad. FirstAid 2000 also comes with its guardian that protects the computer from every crash and errors in the maximum possible extent. But the guardian isn't as efficient as Norton CrashGuard 2000. Finally FirstAid may create more problems that the ones it should solve: indeed the tests always failed when checking our modems. Worst the registry fixes it suggests may damage the computer, as this fixes aren't really safe. Finally the driver suggestions are really strange when it says for example that a laptop hasn't got any game midi connector. Also the update button should download new updates of FirstAid 2000 (as it takes our Windows 98SE for a Windows 95) but the update engine never starts. So in conclusion FirstAid 2000 is really not essential and reliable software.

PGP 2000

Here is the most interesting feature of VirusScan Deluxe for paranoiac users! Pretty Good Privacy the software that scared the secret services has been bought by Network Associates. This new release provides high security encryption with a remarkable ease of use: the wizard will guide and help novice users to create a private key and to configure the security settings in terms of bit encryption (even Diffie-Hellman/DSS encryption method is offered by the software). Your keypair size can be set up to 4096 bits. PGP now works with current email programs like Outlook Express, Eudora, Exchange and runs smoothly with them. A PGPTools toolbar can be displayed to accomplish common PGP tasks easily. PGP also comes with a backup feature that allows user to save their existing keys. More the PGPDisk utility will help you to create a safe place on your hard disk to store your sensitive data and encrypt them: we really appreciate this innovation as it will show (in the explorer) your new 'sensitive' folder as a second and entire hard disk (for example if the HD is C: you can mount it (as a PGPDisk) as your D: drive). Finally PGP 2000 is a great buy as it provides advanced security features even for Virtual Private Network.