Labs

Although a big name in the world of anti-virus software, and more recently with its Security Suite bringing firewalling and spam protection into the fold, previous versions of the McAfee Personal Firewall didn't stand out from the crowds. Firewall Plus 2004 5 is an improvement, with an excellent installation routine. Admittedly, this takes a while to complete, but that's because it's configuring the firewall to your preferences as it goes.

You choose what alerts you want to see; the default of only red alerts makes sense, otherwise you'll be overwhelmed by the things. How you connect alters the setup according to whether you're a dial-up, broadband, home network or office network user and does a good job of second guessing your requirements for each. We liked the Smart Recommendations default for application recognition, automatically blocking any new applications

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based upon the trust levels set, and getting it right every time.

A second setup wizard deals with things if you need Internet Connection Sharing enabled for a simple home network. There's tight integration with McAfee's own Hackerwatch.org testing portal and a Visual Trace feature maps geographic locations of intruders, although both appear to be pretty pointless additions. Better is the upgraded intrusion-detection functionality, which pattern-checks all inbound and outbound packets for matches to known worms - or at least it would have, had it not defaulted to a connection blocking time of zero minutes, which means it does nothing unless you change the application fingerprinting.

Better still is the firewall settings security-check function, which examines the security settings and then makes suggestions to rectify any obvious weak spots. Unfortunately, system stability became an issue. Error messages informing us that the console would have to close when viewing event logs rather spoiled the party. The firewall protection stayed in place, thankfully, but such bugs do little to inspire confidence in a product guarding system security.

This is a black mark against an otherwise intuitive and competent firewall for anyone wanting a fire-and-forget solution. However, advanced users won't like the lack of configurability and not being able to specify which ports individual applications can use, while the £30-per-year licence is expensive.