There is McAfee free download to introduce you to the capabilities of the McAfee line of anti-virus programs. The question is why would you want an anti-virus program in the first place. Well, a virus is a program that is design to wreak havoc with your computer in much the same way as a human virus can make you feel. There are at the very least 100,000+ known viruses and all are design to cause a certain amount of havoc with your computer.

When you go to their website you can get a McAfee virus scan free. They will scan your hard drive for all known viruses, spyware, adware and web dialers. These are all nasty programs that can wreak havoc with your computer. This is a good backup to use in addition to your real time anti-virus software. This is because you and only run one anti-virus program on your computer.

An anti-virus program will find all the viruses it knows about. The problem is that the programs run into and really cannot do anything about are Trojans and piggyback viruses. A Trojan is a virus within a harmless program. A piggyback virus is a virus that is attached to another virus. In this case the first virus is caught and the second gets through. This is an example of where running McAfee virus scan in combination with your primary anti-virus program will catch everything that they know about.

With McAfee’s free download you can test drive their anti-virus program. There is a word of caution that you need to keep in mind not just with this but with any install of an anti-virus program. You cannot run more than one anti-virus program at a time on your system. If you are running XP you may have an anti-virus program running in the background and it will conflict with any anti-virus program you try to install. This is something that is true for all anti-virus programs.