I was quite happily surprised to see that McAfee features detection and auto uninstallation of Sophos Antivirus (clever!).
Unfortunately it didn’t see Sophos Remote Update, so after waiting for 10 minutes for the McAfee Full System Scan (there’s plenty of minutes in one hour!) Sophos Remote Updates reinstalled the SAV that McAfee uninstalled.

It appears to me that it must be quite hard to keep up the counter espionage and I concluded that it’s better to keep focussed on improving your own products rather than following your competitors, so you can auto uninstall their products.

Sophos doesn’t have detection of competitive (however never equalled) software and for a split second I thought that was a bad thing, but my latest experience showed me that it’s better to do your own thing and not mess with other things.

My statement: Auto detection and uninstallation of competitive software is a bad thing.

It is quite difficult to try this software (McAfee) unprejudiced.
But then again: Maybe the 30% performance loss has something to do with that.
And the first McAfee Auto Update failed. The PC is scanning and it’s too slow for me to go and find out why it failed.
More about Sophos Antivirus on this web log | More about McAfee on this web log

Today I am having an encounter of with the latest McAfee 7.1 Active Virus Scan Suite.
We have a customer who made the mistake decided to replace their Sophos Antivirus with McAfee w o r l d w i d e.
Very interesting to see that it features auto uninstallation of Sophos Antivirus.
Let’s see if it also uninstalls Sophos Remote Update and if I’ll be happy afterwards…
I’ll keep you posted.
More about Sophos Antivirus on this web log | More about McAfee on this web log