McAfee Overhaul

I cant believe I am typing this but here goes...

At some point, McAfee overhauled their software. I hadn't used McAfee in over 20 years because it was always bloated and slowed systems down to insufferable speeds. I have only used free AV software like bitdefender free, kaspersky free, Avira, etc. For the last 5+ years, I had been exclusively kaspersky because their detection rates were always the best and their resource performance was always the best. Now with the kaspersky ban going into effect, I had to find a new option.

I was going to just jump straight back to bitdefender free. It works well and resource usage was OK. After installing, I noticed it used 500MB+ of ram where as kaspersky was like only 190-200MB. I found this was normal for bitdefender but I couldn't find it acceptable. It definitely felt like it slowed down the system.

At this point I started investigating what the other options were available. I went to all the AV testing sites and found this performance test at AV-comparatives:
LINK /

Somehow McAfee by far had the best system performance result and for a few years now has ranked as good as anything in detection rates. I thought about this for a bit and realized my ISP provides free McAfee subscription. I decided to give it a try.

I gotta say it is nothing like the old McAfee. The installation ends up with only 2 running services and uses only about 120MB of RAM. The computers still feel fast and snappy in usage and the UI has been greatly simplified to where it is almost as simple as bitdefender. You just install it and it works.

So kudos to McAfee. It only took them 3 decades to fix their crap but it appears they finally have. For anyone looking for free AV options, check to see if your ISP offers free McAfee subscriptions and if they do give it a try.