Product Reviews

Internet Cleanup is a suite of tools that claims to be able to protect your PC from malware that your anti-virus software won't spot. It includes an anti-spyware program, IC Spyware, which is meant to detect more than 6,000 nasties. It's amazingly fast, but most of the problems it found were false alarms and it failed to detect common exploits such as changing your browser's home page.

Personal Info Protector is a secure store for website passwords, credit card details and personal information. You can use it to fill in webforms quickly and it will alert you if an application is trying to send this information over the web.

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There's also Quick Fill, a browser toolbar that you can use to store login and password details for websites you visit often. It then automatically logs you on to that site whenever you visit it. This worked well in Internet Explorer, but crashed Firefox at every startup.

Net Blockade blocks ads, pop-ups, cookies and other internet irritants. It's pretty effective using the installation defaults, but can be customised to block sites that aren't detected automatically. To hide your web-surfing tracks there's Fast Clean, which erases your browser history lists, cookies and cache files. It's simple and fast, and it supports Firefox as well as Internet Explorer.

SpamCatcher is a powerful spam filter that works with any POP3 email program. It can approve or block email by email address, IP address, country, language or using public blacklists. It can also analyse message content to separate wanted email from spam.

FileSystemGuard lets you protect files and folders. With a single master password, you can lock and unlock any of your files and folders. However, files aren't encrypted, so the data is still accessible by those in the know, and you must remember to unlock everything before a backup.