MacAfee

I know I complained about Symantec and their increasingly worthless Norton Systemworks a while back, and I actually did something about it. I deleted it and installed the MacAfee Security Center. It has one major advantage over Norton, and that is that Comcast provides it for free. It has some other advantages, but it also has some drawbacks. It's not nearly the resource hog that Norton is, however, whenever it downloads and installs updates it uses up so much of my resources that it renders my computer unusable until it's completed. And it doesn't give me the option of scheduling these updates, they are automatic.

Next, the email scanner also is a system hog, but at least doesn't take nearly as long. The one thing that really pisses me off is that it will ocassionally scan an outgoing message, give me some cryptic error message that it couldn't be sent, and tell me to try re-sending the message, but deletes the email. Since I don't save copies of sent messages, that means retyping the entire email. Sure I could alleviate this problem by changing my settings to save outgoing mail, but then I would periodically be required to go in and deleted all the saved messages, which would be an entirely new annoyance.

Thirdly, it schedules a virus scan for every Friday. I have the option to change the day, and probably should one of these days, but I don't have the option to change the frequency. I don't think that a weekly virus scan is really necessary. I think I could very well get by with bi-weekly, or probably even monthly since it has never found a virus. And like everything else MacAfee does, it criples my system when the virus scan is running. And since it takes 3 or 4 hours to complete, it's a major inconvenience.

I guess my only other alternative that I'm aware of is Microsoft Onecare. Has anyone used that or know anything about it? I know that unlike MacAfee, it's not free. Or is the real solution that I just have to fork over enough dough for a new PC? It's starting to wear on me.