Panda Internet Security 2008

Panda's new security suite has a more glamorous, professional look than previous versions, as if the company is trying to distance itself from the cutesy connotations of its name. It's a respectable goal, but slightly undermined by the fact that the System Tray icon is still a black and white bear.

With the new look comes a new buzzword: "megadetection" - a multilayer approach that, the company claims, is more effective than traditional methods. Our tests, however, suggested otherwise: its score of 93% wasn't dreadful, but six packages did better.

When we moved on to web-based threats, Panda fell further behind, not lifting a finger to stop phishing emails and detecting malicious downloads from just 14% of bad sites. Firewall behaviour was unexceptional, too, with the GFI Security Scanner finding five points of vulnerability, although Panda did at least warn us we were being scanned.

Panda's antispam features were remarkably good, catching 90% of our spam right out of the box when working with the Windows Mail junk filter. Online backup is a useful and distinctive feature, too: you get only 1GB of space and, naturally, it's yours only for the duration of your licence, but it shows how serious Panda is about its new product.

Although the peripheral features are good, Panda isn't top-tier when it comes to protection, and it's a resource hog to boot, somehow driving up our startup RAM usage above 700MB. We're more impressed than we were with Panda's previous product, but we're not ready to recommend Panda Internet Security just yet.

Author: Darien Graham-Smith