Product Reviews

Trend Micro's PC-cillin Internet Security 2007 offers protection from computer viruses, hackers and spam, as well as including parental controls and a monitor for your wireless network. It looks good value: not only does it cover almost every angle of security, but its price includes a licence to install it on up to three PCs. One of these can be used to check that the others have been properly updated.

The anti-spam software is among the most effective we've seen, and will work with most email clients, including Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, Thunderbird, and even email services like Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. The program examines incoming email and moves messages that

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it classifies as spam into a folder, which it creates automatically in your email software. If you prefer, you can change this so that the word SPAM: appears in the subject line instead.

The firewall is very flexible, and you can create preset profiles that are easy to switch between. This is particularly useful for laptops, which may be used on a relatively safe Ethernet network one day and on an unsafe wireless network the next. The way the firewall handles rules is very simple, and you're unlikely to make silly mistakes setting it up that would compromise security. It was also able to detect some fairly sneaky hacking tricks that we launched against it.

There are a number of other privacy tools, such as fraud detection for notifying you when visiting websites that try to fool you into giving out your details.

PC-cillin's virus detecting abilities are sadly not great. With recent viruses, it was the least accurate product we've seen except Avast!, which is free. Products from Eset, F-Secure, Kaspersky Lab and Steganos are all superior.

Despite some decent modules, particularly the firewall and anti-spam, we can't recommend PC-cillin because detecting viruses is critically important these days and it just doesn't cut it in this area.