AOL Dumps Kaspersky for McAfee to Power Free Antivirus

A savvy reader informed me, nearly a month ago, that AOL's Active Virus Shield, an app which I've recommended highly in the past, had suddenly gone offline. I asked AOL what was up and got some vague assurances that the problem was being fixed and an update was imminent. Weeks passed, and I unfortunately forgot about it altogether.

Today I got a surprise follow-up from AOL. The beloved Active Virus Shield, which was powered by Kaspersky, is gone. In its place is AOL Internet Security Central, which is now powered by McAfee.

I downloaded the new Security Center (a pretty painless process that requires only an AOL or AIM login, though I encountered a series of errors when trying to download the software the first time) and installed it to put it through its paces. The new Security Center is completely unrelated to the old Kaspersky system. There are pros and cons, of course.

The good news is it's reasonably thorough, and it ferreted out a number of intentional security risks on my machine, though it did return one false alarm involving some "dangerous" text files. The new Security Center also includes a firewall, and it also works well. By and large, this is the same as the McAfee you have to pay for, though it doesn't include the spyware or anti-spam systems (though, frankly, neither of those are very useful anyway). Why pay $50 a year to McAfee when you can get it from AOL for free? (As with the prior AOL security suite, there's no adware or any other promotional facet aside from having to have an AOL account.)

The new AOL software is more flexible than the old Kaspersky version: I use the Alexa toolbar on one machine, for example, to keep track of my website's Alexa rank, and the new AOL security system lets you set an exception for it. The old suite didn't, automatically deleting the toolbar from my PC as a spyware risk. As well, the addition of a firewall is a nice touch.

On the downside, the new suite is slow. How slow? Crazy slow: It took over 2 1/2 hours to run a full scan of my PC, when other tools scanned the same PC in less than an hour. I've always found McAfee more intrusive than I'd like, too, and almost impossible to uninstall. In general, Kaspersky is considered "better" security than McAfee, though that's open for debate.

I'll keep running the software for the next month at least and will update this post with any additional thoughts. Meanwhile, give it a try. McAfee isn't a bad antivirus platform, but it can be an intrusive nuisance. So far, I like what I see here, and at least the price is right.

Download: New McAfee Security Center - Special Edition from AOL