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McAfee Corporate AV Nightmare

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M3Fan

Programmer
Dec 28, 2001
73
US
Our corporation has been using Symantec Antivirus corporate for years with no problems. We've been very happy with it. We have about 55 client PCs and 5 servers. However, I've heard nothing but awful reviews of their latest version, Endpoint Protection 11. Resource hogging and network issues were major problems cited with this latest edition from Symantec.

Because of this, I thought it might be a good time to switch to a different product. We purchased licenses for McAfee Entrerprise AV (8.7i) and deployed it along with the McAfee Agent on about half of our machines. Of those machines, half of them are fine, and the other half, including mine, have been crippled by McAfee AV. My normally fast machine now takes about 5 minutes to load. Most programs, but mainly IE7, hang constantly between web requests. As in, no spinning indicator showing that it's working on something- IE just hangs all the time. Working with their tech support has gained us nothing except "we haven't heard anything about computers slowing down from this". We even dropped down to 8.5 and experienced the same results. I was unable to do a system restore unless I was in safe mode after uninstalling McAfee. Now that I've done a full restore, my system is still not what it was before McAfee. Needless to say, we are done with McAfee. In all my years of IT I've never seen a program cripple an operating system like McAfee AV has. I can't think of any commonality between the machines that are affected vs. those that run fine. No significant processor or memory usage is visible during these system hangs so it's not a resource issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions for enterprise AV besides Symantec and McAfee?
 
Look carefully at Sophos.


James P. Cottingham
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[sup]I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229![/sup]
 
I wouldn't give up yet. Mcafee support should be able to work with your to determine the cause of the slowness. Demand that they help you and raise heck if they don't.
 
Quick update: We may have figured out the problem. There is a script scanning feature that we disabled on the server console (EPO Manager). Once we did this, all speeds returned to normal across the company. What is VERY odd about this is that even computers which had McAfee uninstalled completely, as in, nowhere on the machine, also sped up considerably. Let me clarify this for you- I did a system restore on my computer to restore it to a point before I had even installed McAfee and my computer was still dreadfully slow- boot up, shut down, suspend, launching apps, etc., were all crippled. I had McAfee AV nowhere on my computer at all- not a trace- and unchecking that option on the server side returned my computer to normal speed. How about that for odd? I've never seen such a mysterious and illogical problem in all of my IT experience.
 
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