Product Reviews

The complexity of security software means it's difficult to differentiate between the numerous suites on the market. You might be seduced by grand claims that a product offers a new kind of protection against malware, or by system tune-up tools that are thrown in. PC Tools Internet Security is no exception: it promises to give you better virus protection by 'seamlessly combining anti-virus technology with anti-spyware technology'. Sounds impressive, but does it really deliver?

There were no issues with installation, although the program didn't offer to scan our PC for viruses first. Some viruses try to prevent anti-virus software installing, so this could be an issue if you're hoping to remove existing viruses.

Most of the features we'd expect - anti-virus, anti-spyware, anti-spam and firewall protection - are included. They're presented in a slick, easy-to-use control panel that clearly shows which features are enabled. It's obvious how to enable or disable each feature, and three other tabs provide easy access to scanning options and settings. This is one of the most intuitive suites we've seen.

We were initially unimpressed by the high number of new program access alerts that we encountered. These subsided after an hour or so, but suites such as Norton 360 generate very few, if any, of these over-protective alerts for commonly used applications such as Internet Explorer.

There are three ways to perform a virus scan: Intelli-Scan, Full and Custom. Intelli-Scan scans your web browser

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plug-ins, cookies and scripts, the Windows Registry, currently running processes, startup processes, and selected folders on your hard disk. We were pleased to find it also scans for malicious Layered Service Providers - malware that could potentially provide a way for hackers to intercept and re-route data sent from your PC. This completed in an impressive five minutes. The Full option scans your entire hard disk, which took an hour to complete on our PC. Custom Scan allows you to select folders you want to scan as well as which scanners you wish to use.

Under curfew

Internet Security is genuinely different to other programs in that it actively guards against spyware entering your PC. We were alerted to harmless but irritating tracker cookies, used by advertising companies to monitor surfing habits. Background scanning can be extensively customised, providing options to deactivate any of the scanning processes in a couple of clicks. For example, you can disable email scans if you only use webmail, avoiding unnecessary processing.

We also liked the update procedure. This takes place in the background while you're working, requiring no user intervention. Features like this meant we could forgive the slower than average startup time, since we could see it was for a reason.

Unfortunately, PC Tools Internet Security is let down by the fact that its virus scanner doesn't offer heuristic (behaviour-based) detection. This leaves you vulnerable to new threats that haven't yet been added to the program's signature database via updates, as the virus scanner may be unable to tell they're malicious. There is a beta version add-on which you can download, but we think this is an essential feature that should have been included. This could be part of the reason why, although the program detected and removed five out of five recent viruses in our testing, it failed to gain the benchmark Virus Bulletin VB100 award for picking up 100% of newly discovered ('wild list') viruses.

Overall, PC Tools is a usable and effective suite, but not the most impressive.