LiveSafe Feedback

[BorisV]

After being a loyal Norton by Symantec customer for ages, totally disregarding McAfee as an option, I recently decided to try the flagship LiveSafe service. I've now used it for 30 days so I would like to provide some constructive and hopefully valuable feedback.

So let's start with the goods first.

What I like about LiveSafe is:

1. Easy to choose
2. Covers unlimited devices
3. Installation is quite slow, but seems to be reliable and requires only one button
4. Security centre is well organised and feeds me high-quality security news from McAfee blog, which shows the company's commitment and passion
5. Light and quiet, in fact it's one of the least obtrusive packages I've ever seen
6. The in-product language is cool and user-friendly
7. The Open Sans font and the red color run from the website to the help files of the product, making it easy-to-distinguish. It's nice to see such a consistency. 

What I dislike about LiveSafe is:

1. User Interface is a disaster. Every window is large, but shows minimum of information. Scan window barely even shows the file it scans. Most of the time you can't even see the drive letter. Upon threat detection, there is a "Tell me more" or something like that button. Once pressed it opens a splash screen, then it opens the main window and then another huge window to display the name of the threat and the file path only. The name of the threat is not a link to the threat centre online, which I find weird. Firewall alerts show no information about the connection a program would like to make.  Security history barely shows any details about events. For example it does not show all the files and registry entries that McAfee has removed while cleaning the infection. The UI is perfect for novice users that would open the product from time to time, but advanced users would like to see more details. And all this unused space in the windows should be utilised better.
2. Scheduled Scans have no settings and weird scheduling settings. No option to choose between full and quick scan and no option to schedule more than one scan.
3. Antivirus has no settings and this is what I hate the most. I know the business products allow Real Protect aggressiveness to be configured and this needs to be ported to the home products ASAP. I want to use Real Protect with the highest sensitivity possible.
4. Help files are poor and provide almost no overview and explanation of the product features. For example I failed to establish how exactly the Firewall's IDS works and what it protects against.
5. Product has a good detection, but cannot clean everything it deems malicious. For example there is a "suspect" detection, which requires tech support to be contacted. It sometimes hangs on deletion for long and I am not entirely sure if it remediates the threat properly, as I'll say it again, the product provides no details about what's been removed.
6. It would've been nice if the main window supported drag and drop for quick and easy scanning of files.
7. A faster scanning speed would be greatly appreciated too.
8. Last, but not least, hopefully we'll get the same performance history tool that would soon come out with your gamer security product.

As an overall, I love the LiveSafe product and do not intend to change it any time soon. I would love to see some improvements though. 

[Peacekeeper]

Thanks for the review and thoughts. I have passed this onto a McAfee staffer who might be interested in reading this as he is involved in the program's features.

[tromine · Accepted solution]

BorisV-

Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback.  I agree with most of your observations, and there are already some development plans moving in the direction of some of your recommendations!  We appreciate your input...keep it coming.

Tracy Romine

[BorisV]

Spoiler

I’ve just been reading your posts across the community and I do have the feeling that the cool in-product language like “We make sure your emails are from who they say they are, and not a thief pretending to be your bank or long-lost relative” comes from you 😂. Or at least it’s been refined by you.

[tromine]

Well thanks Boris! Yeah, I contribute to some of it...but truth be told, we have a 'Content' team that it ultimately falls to, and they decided a couple years ago to start writing the way we speak! I like common language much more than phony informal corporate-speak.

[BorisV]

The common language is one of the reasons I got so interested in McAfee, after I saw screenshots. I dumped more than a year of active subscription with Symantec to test LiveSafe and now I simply don’t want to uninstall it. It’s too comfy and nice.

[BorisV]

PC Optimisation Suggestion:

The PC optimisation can be improved by adding start-up manager and disk defrag, that provides a UI for the built-in Windows tool. Both of these won’t require much of a development, but would allow for a more complete optimisation solution in Total Protection.

Vulnerability Scanner Suggestion:

Vulnerability Scanner can be greatly improved by scanning Windows settings, such as Task Manager disabled in registry (many nasty programs do that), Windows Update turned off, checking the DNS and proxy settings, as sometimes threats modify that and add proxy scripts, etc. Any setting that lowers the security is a vulnerability and needs to be corrected.

Regards,

[BorisV]

The PC optimisation can be improved by adding start-up manager and disk defrag, that provides a UI for the built-in Windows tool. Both of these won’t require much of a development, but would allow for a more complete optimisation solution in Total Protection.

Vulnerability Scanner Suggestion:

Vulnerability Scanner can be greatly improved by scanning Windows settings, such as Task Manager disabled in registry (many nasty programs do that), Windows Update turned off, checking the DNS and proxy settings, as sometimes threats modify that and add proxy scripts, etc. Any setting that lowers the security is a vulnerability and needs to be corrected.

Regards,

[BorisV]

Vulnerability Scanner can be greatly improved by scanning Windows settings, such as Task Manager disabled in registry (many nasty programs do that), Windows Update turned off, checking the DNS and proxy settings, as sometimes threats modify that and add proxy scripts, etc. Any setting that lowers the security is a vulnerability and needs to be corrected.

Regards,

[DrTechnical]

I would like to add one item to BorisV's assessment of LiveSafe.  I have the product installed on all my devices, but I have encountered one issue that is a frustrating one for me.

I configured my scheduled scans to take place 4 days a week at 1AM, during a time when I am not at my PC's.  Recently, I went out of town for a few days, so I powered down my PC's.

Today, when I turned on one of my PC's this afternoon, LiveSafe began a scheduled scan.  Because this particular PC has a modest CPU and RAM, the scheduled scan SERIOUSLY degraded the performance of the PC, to the point where it was virtually impossible to get anything done.

When I tried to cancel the scan, LiveSafe appeared to ignore me, continuing to run.  As a programmer and developer myself, I find this program behavior VERY annoying.  If I click an event labeled "Cancel", I expect the process to STOP!!!  After repeated attempts to get the scan to stop, I tried to get the scan to "Pause", hoping that if I could pause the scan, cancelling it would be easier.  Eventually, I got the scan to cancel, but I wasted a LOT of time waiting for LiveSafe to respond to my requests.

Which leads me to another complaint: If I schedule my scans to take place at 1AM, I don't expect them to start up at 1PM, just because I booted up at that time.  I appreciate that McAfee LiveSafe may detect that I missed one or more scheduled scans and wants to perform a scan to get me current, but LiveSafe should NOT default to starting a "missed" scheduled scan without asking me if I want to run such a scan, especially because the impact on a modest PC with large storage and many files can severely compromise my ability to get any work done.

SO...what can be done to:

1) make LiveSafe stop IMMEDIATELY when one clicks "Cancel" or "Pause", and

2) stop LiveSafe from immediately beginning "makeup" scans at startup if a PC has been powered down for many days and has missed one or more scheduled scans, and replace that process with one that alerts the user that scheduled scans have been missed and asks if the user wishes to start a scheduled scan process immediately to get current.

[Peacekeeper]

yes that seems to be a feature to catch up missed scans been that way for quite a while. Hopefully Tracey the manager a Mcafee employee will see this comment. Re ignoring the cancel will confirm myself.

[Peacekeeper]

Cancel worked 1st time for me allowed it to scan 2345files and get to 28%. Never seen it get stuck in a loop. Can you retry this cancel option.