Labs

PC-cillin is a feature-packed security package. It contains a firewall, anti-virus software, anti-spam filter, wireless networking intrusion detection and profiles that contain customisable sets of options. Plug your laptop into a network at home and choose the Home profile; plug it in at work and choose the Work profile. Switching between groups of settings like this is handy.

Although the firewall is very simple to use, it's not lacking in features. It had one of the least confusing rules systems, using the concept of Exceptions, which will be familiar to anyone who has used Windows XP's

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SP2 firewall. Getting IIS working correctly without exposing the mail and file transfer services was as simple as creating a single rule to allow incoming traffic from the internet on port 80 (HTTP). This might not sound simple to firewall novices, but if you're going to let computers on the internet access your PC, you need to become familiar with such terms or risk providing them with too much access.

The firewall noticed both our unsubtle and stealthy scans. It also detected the web attacks, logging them correctly. One small point to note is that the log file doesn't update in real time, so you can't watch it fill up with entries. Instead you need to close it and re-open it again to see what's happened.

Although this is one of the most expensive packages to buy, its price is comparable with those of other decent internet security suites. At just less than £20 per year, renewing the annual subscription is not too expensive, either.

The anti-virus part of the deal lets PC-cillin down, however. In our tests it missed a few Trojans, which matches the performance of earlier releases. The firewall is the strongest reason to buy PC-cillin Internet Security 12.