Tim appears to be part of the official MCAF propoganda team but his mind-boggling lack of knowledge regarding the company's products or competing products leads me to believe otherwise.
Excerpts from a PC Week review of MCAF's remote connection product:
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McAfee Associates Inc. may have been a bit premature in posting its Remote Desktop 2.0 beta software on a public World Wide Web site, its bugginess, even for beta software, should lead customers to thoroughly check under the hood of the final release before they buy.
PC Week Labs tests disclosed a surprisingly long list of nasty bugs in the beta software, enough to make us wonder about the effectiveness of quality assurance testing. It also may require newer PC hardware to run properly, and it isn't backward-compatible for remote control of Windows 3.x or DOS clients, which may preclude its use in some sites.
Unless McAfee is unusually fast with bug fixes, we would stick with the primary Windows 95 and Windows NT remote control competitors for near-term buying decisions--Avalan Technology Inc.'s Remotely Possible 32 or Symantec Corp.'s PCAnywhere32.
Performance at the Windows 95 agent (slave) PCs was diminished for some operations. Remote Desktop runs delta compression by default, which automatically selects only changed information to be sent between computers, but it wasn't enough to prevent the delays. When running Paint, we were continually reminded in draw mode that the speed wasn't there--circles turned into flat-sided polygons. Menu navigation seemed sluggish, and Remote Desktop's own chat window was
tediously slow.
On the NT server, the agent should respond at full speed because it uses the GDI (Graphics Device Interface) hooking mechanism device driver. Although windows flickered and jumped when we moved them, our slower PC never could connect to it due to some inexplicable timing problem between the two.
We set the agent to let the user acknowledge or deny a connection attempt and found it convenient for resisting an outside invasion. However, in one test the agent acknowledged and made the connection, while the controller said the connection was refused and didn't display the remote.
We disliked the drag button, which allowed us to pan a larger remote screen. It seemed to do the opposite of what we expected and turned the screen to black when we turned on the zoom feature.
The chat feature is enabled when a connection is made, but on one occasion the agent's chat box got out of sync with the controller, losing a character, and on another we mistakenly typed in the
other PC's chat box by remote control and confused the connection, forcing a disconnect. McAfee is investigating these bugs along with others.
Although McAfee gets high marks for product concept, the execution faltered overall. Part of the problem lay with allowing users extra ways to hang themselves. We committed computer suicide by connecting two Windows 95 PCs to each other with each being controlled by the other. We don't recommend it, since recursive windows aren't very useful. We suspect that there may be a use for that capability somewhere, but our cursors became confused and the connection ultimately bombed with a network error.
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Why don't they just release a product brochure and forget about their lame attempts at software development. Antivirus shareware hackers is all they are. |
