Product Reviews

It works well, it's easy to use and it won't make a hole in your pocket. This is our choice of antivirus product for all-round value.

Prevention

We had to use someone's virus collection to test the products here, and we choose to use McAfee's, so we weren't too surprised to see VirusScan perform very well in this trial. However, we were determined not to give McAfee an easy ride. We didn't want to over-emphasise this initial test by publishing the exact number of viruses in the collection picked up, disinfected or quarantined by each program. And it certainly wouldn't have been fair to base our tests on the McAfee collection alone.

This is why we ran our additional tests with the Trojans and a basic home-brew script. VirusScan was able to detect and quarantine our basic script and Trojan files, but missed our customised version of Back Orifice. This is a bit of a worry, because we created it in five minutes using free software readily available from the Internet. We didn't have to go underground to get these files, they're out in the open - but we won't tell you exactly how we did it, for obvious reasons. Given that all but one of the products tested here missed our home-grown Trojan, it's clear that a firewall (which would have blocked the Trojan from working) is an essential partner product to your antivirus software.

In all other areas VirusScan was very impressive. It has a quarantine feature, lets you protect settings with a password and even comes with a special backup program called Safe and Sound that saves copies of files as you use them. You can restore your work from these backups

It's just as well that this backup software is included, because the package lacks a file integrity checker. It's not a terrible omission, but any extra safety nets are handy as long as they don't take up too much processor power. Bear in mind that running Safe and Sound or similar software will slow your PC too, though.

Ease of use

One-click scanning and fairly intuitive tools, such as the quarantine area, help make this program easy to use. The update system was as painless as they come, and it's quite easy to dig down to the advanced settings when you want them. Which brings us neatly on to mention that all of the heuristic settings are buried under a number of menu levels. We initially found them by accident, and you need to follow the same contrived path to set heuristics for e-mail and download scanning. At this point, the Windows XP-a-like interface zooms back a few years and starts looking like a Windows 95 program. Odd.

Internet filtering is simple to set up. It can deflect potentially damaging Java and ActiveX objects that may be present on some Web pages. While the likelihood of finding such pages is low, authors of recent Web-based worms have started exploring such possibilities. Sites can be blocked according to their Web addresses. For example, you can prevent users of your computer wasting time at sites such as www.friendsreunited.co.uk.

Overall

Because VirusScan was allowed to take the virus detection trial on its home turf, we were particularly critical of its performance set against our other tests and criteria. At the end of the day, though, it comes through brilliantly. It does everything you'll need, works well as a single program, and we know from previous experience that it plugs into McAfee's Personal Firewall 3 seamlessly. A quality firewall/antivirus combination is a very sensible thing to have on any Internet-connected Windows PC.

If you'd like to try McAfee's online version of VirusScan, visit www.mcafee.com, where you'll be able to use the service free for 30 days.

It uses the same engine as this program but costs about half as much for a year's subscription.