Personally I believe this "test" was OK a long time ago, but not any longer.
We must  simply believe the installed ant-virus works and is "alert." Testing
it with "one" (old) signature leaves a lot to be desired.
The real test, as the writer stated, is when the warning message pops up. At
my place of work, we got lazy, only updating the weekly signature files and
failed to update the engine. A situation arose and we installed the updated
engine (after all we already paid for it) and that night McAffee picked off
several infected files stored on our NT server. These were the newest
viruses. Needless to say we cleaned the user's PCs and now we stay on top to
it
Mike Hayes

> <<Why do I continually feel we are not being well served by these AV
>  programs?>>
>
>  You can test your a-v program by downloading a dummy virus test file from
>  the McAfee site (and probably the Norton site).  This file is virus-like
>  but harmless and is designed to test your a-v alertness.  You can download
>  it and email it to yourself as an attachment.
>

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