Labs

PC-cillin is one of the most popular anti-virus programs in the world, although it is much more so in Japan than in Europe. It's worth mentioning this fact because an anti-virus product that is used by so many people really ought to be good at its job. Failing to be effective will mean that the millions of PCs on which it is installed will be vulnerable to all kinds of viruses that will then spread to other computers.

The PC-cillin virus scanner is part of an internet security suite that contains a good anti-spam scanner and a firewall as well as some privacy tools. If you think

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that the price looks a little heavy, you should bear in mind that the licence allows the software to be installed on three PCs. You can even use one PC to manage the security of the others over the network, and this is a very nice touch.

So far so good, but how did the anti-virus system perform in our tests? Sadly, the answer is: abysmally. With the exception of the free Avast!, PC-cillin was the least accurate product that we tested. It found just 65 per cent of the email viruses it downloaded from our server and a pitiful 16 per cent of the web-based threats. This is an astoundingly poor result for a piece of popular commercial software and it adds further support to our evidence that market leaders don't always provide the best products available.

Because of these dreadful test results, we simply couldn't recommend PC-cillin, even if the anti-spam and firewall elements were brilliant. If you do have three PCs then you can equip each with a copy of Steganos for only slightly more than the cost of this package. You will, of course, still need to fork out for a personal firewall and anti-spam software, but we think that this is a worthwhile expense to bear.