Labs

Don't let the word 'Suite' in the name of this product fool you. CyberScrub, just like Window Washer, specialises in erasing traces of your activity on your local machine and offers little else. It doesn't throw in any extras such as anti-spyware or address-cloaking facilities, so you'd expect it to do the job of removing sensitive information pretty effectively, - especially given the price.

Fortunately, it doesn't disappoint, offering extremely thorough cleaning with browser history files, cache and cookies up for removal - plus a range of system and application traces, from news readers to instant messaging software.

The list of applications supported as standard may not be quite as comprehensive as Window Washer's, but again you can define your own if you use software that's not on the list - and there are some areas where CyberScrub offers more support. It offers, for example, a more comprehensive choice of secure-deletion 'strengths'.

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There are several government-standard methods on offer to help make absolutely sure that no one can recover your deleted files when you take your PC in for repair or sell it on.

All in all, there are 10 deletion methods to choose from. These range from a single-pass method, which only overwrites data once, to the 30-pass Gutmann method.

To delete a file, simply right-click it with your mouse, and choose Erase Beyond Recovery. CyberScrub lets you select more than one file at a time to be erased.

Another thing CyberScrub does that Window Washer doesn't is to recognise and clean the cookies, history and cache files of the Opera Internet browser. On the downside, it will only do this for versions 6 and 8. There's also wider support for file-sharing applications such as Kazaa and Bearshare than the other items of software here.

Last but not least, there is one handy extra - an encrypted password-protected 'safe' for storing sensitive documents and folders. It's a good idea, but is poorly executed. First, you have to remember to press an extra button to remove the originals from your drive; second, when restoring files and especially folders from the safe, CyberScrub doesn't always put them back where they were originally.

This is a decent piece of software, but it doesn't quite do enough for our money. While the range of activities it will clean for you is extremely comprehensive, it lacks the extra features of Internet Cleanup and Ghostsurf and, overall, it's not as easy to use as Window Washer.