F-Secure Internet Security 2008

F-Secure 2008's airy blue imagery and liberal slogan ("sure you can!") convey an attractive sense of freedom from security worries - a sense reinforced by a simple, almost perfunctory user interface, as if the software doesn't want to make a fuss.

That's not to say its security standards are lax. In our firewall test, it managed to conceal our PC entirely, rendering it unassailable. It also removed every one of our phishing emails from our inbox the second they arrived, although when we visited bad websites it only stepped in and saved us in 86% of cases.

F-Secure is also quite lightweight, with little impact on boot time, and has a memory footprint that isn't too high. Disappointingly, though, when it came to straightforward malware, F-Secure's performance was one of the least impressive this month: its score of 90% landed it in eighth place. It also took an annoyingly long time to clean up malware on some occasions, keeping us waiting for more than two minutes while it "processed" the infected files - even when we'd asked it to simply delete them. And it complained on three occasions during our false-positives test.

We were also irritated by the fact that, when parental controls are enabled, you have to enter the parental password every time you want to access the F-Secure interface. No other package was as intrusive about this.

To cap it all, it's pricey for a relatively limited feature set at £52 for a single PC licence. Although the F-Secure philosophy is certainly appealing, its other weaknesses mean it isn't top of the charts in this Labs.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith