Labs

These days, you don't have to be on the Web for more than a few minutes to pick up spyware - software that quietly installs itself on your PC and causes ads to pop up, or even reports your online activities back to its maker.

It's this sort of activity that Aladdin Systems' Internet Cleanup is designed to protect you against. It comes with a free year's subscription to Allume's anti-spyware program. You also get Internet trace destructor, which allows you to find and destroy cookies, cached files, plug-ins, web addresses and recently opened file history lists. This makes it impossible for the average person to see where you've been on the Web or what you've been looking at.

Crucially, the

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program wipes the traces in your hard-to-remove index.dat files, which contain records of every Web site ever visited.

Internet Cleanup is also relatively easy to customise. Unlike Internet Anonym, for instance, it allows you to specify Web sites, cookies and other objects which you want to be exempt from your clean-ups. This allows you to easily wipe things you don't want people to see, without making it more difficult to use non-critical sites you use regularly. You can also specify whether you want to delete a file, or 'secure erase' it. Erasing the file in this way will prevent anyone other than a security professional recovering it. You also get an ad blocker that stops pop-ups, in-page banners and scripts from executing.

Unfortunately, Internet Cleanup has some flaws. While it worked fine for Internet Explorer and Firefox, it failed to pick up on an installation of Opera during testing. We also had difficulties in getting the ad blocker to work, and there's no choice given over the 'strength' of secure deletion.

Otherwise, Internet Cleanup is great value. It doesn't do anything particularly radical, but the fact that it provides both anti-spyware software and an easy-to-use Net garbage disposal for just £20 would otherwise be something worth shouting about.