Labs

Installing PC-cillin from Trend Micro is simple: no custom install option, nothing harder to choose from than either the full security suite or just the AV component. The only other option available at this stage brings us back to the land of the bizarre: whether to take the recommended route or the rather odd lightweight installation, which leaves you with no email scanning or network features, just real-time scanning. Heck, if you aren't connecting to a network and don't email, why are you buying an Internet security suite?

However, just when you think all hope is lost, PC-cillin goes all sensible again and actually asks if you want to close the Windows XP Firewall should it find it running, which is something none of the other application installers did. A sensible system memory scan is performed before the installation nitty gritty, but once again, as we've witnessed so often, there's no option for a full system scan in order to be on the safe side.

Once set up and rebooted you should go through the download and update routine, and you can start to stroll through the myriad settings and features, most of which are truly innovative and a breath of fresh air. The Network Virus Emergency Centre offers options to help prevent rapid spread of infection through a network, red alert pop-ups and halting of all network traffic upon detection. More original is the very welcome, and unique among these software firewalls, Wi-Fi feature: this detects and warns of potential intrusions into your wireless network. It can be configured to make its checks as often as you like, but the default 30 minutes seems about right to us.

We also like the inclusion of a home network control, which enables you to remotely monitor and configure the protection on other computers on your LAN, assuming they're also running Trend Micro's security software. Being able to manage all the functions on these remote machines from a

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single interface, and password protect those settings, shouldn't be underestimated. There are, of course, licences available to cover such a scenario.

In general, the level of private data protection is good, and we were especially appreciative of the Phishing Guide available on a button press in the private data entry window. Indeed, Trend Micro has a pleasant habit of bucking the use of Help buttons leading to meaningless paragraphs and instead building these mini-guides right into the relevant part of the user interface.

Equally innovative is the availability of built-for-purpose webmail and email scanning, and it worked well when we put it through its paces. This is more than can be said for the spam filtering, which was a little erratic to say the least. Maybe the sheer size of our stream of spam and genuine messages mixed up was the problem, but there's no excusing the shameful 5.8 per cent false-positive rate. Changing the default settings may help to balance this, as will training over time, but if you lose that much email to start with then there's a good chance you may lose your confidence along with it.

There's no such problem on the spyware scanning front. This was as thorough as we hoped for, provided we avoided the quick mode that only looks for rogue Registry entries and ignores anything hiding elsewhere. It runs so quickly that you might be forgiven for thinking it hadn't done anything at all and need to run it again - we did!

Something we could run over and over again is the superb Security Check feature that scanned the computer for Microsoft security vulnerabilities. Sure, you can run Windows Update and do this yourself, but what a good idea to integrate it into a security console where it belongs.

What isn't such a good idea is to include a Parental Control function that proved very little barrier to our test teenagers, who were able to load up each of our adult and gambling sites without so much as a by your leave. It isn't as if they were particularly obscure sites either, unless you don't associate Ladbrokes.com and pokermillion.com with gambling, of course. PC-cillin is meant to filter web content based on 20 categories, as well as enable the creation of personal blacklists.

This failure and the high false-positive rate hit PC-cillin hard, which is a shame because, all things taken into consideration, we liked it otherwise - especially for the helpful guides throughout, the Wi-Fi threat detection and the remote control functionality.