Labs

Best known for its free and easy-to-use firewall, ZoneAlarm is now available in several flavours. This one includes a basic anti-virus element, which forms a small part of a rounded firewall and application control program.

ZoneAlarm Antivirus is not an expensive program, costing well below the average price of the others we tested. Its renewal price is low, and on this basis, it looks like an attractive prospect, not least because its firewall is flexible and effective.

The anti-virus system is relatively discreet and there aren't many settings. You can enable or disable

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the email scanner and play with a couple of advanced settings including a heuristics option that is enabled by default. There is a scan schedule option, too, but it's very basic. A quarantine area for infected files is available, and you can select which files or folders to scan. But that's about it.

The virus scanner has a progress bar as annoying asNorton AntiVirus's. It bounces back and forward, rather than indicating its progress. The other main part of the interface is a window that shows if the anti-virus system is on or off, and also indicates if definitions are too old.

Performance in detecting viruses and Trojans is not great, although the combination of firewall and anti-virus software is a powerful one. The anti-virus scanner missed four of our Trojans. But when one tried to contact the internet the firewall stopped it. This doesn't excuse the anti-virus scanner's slackness, and we don't like the idea of malware running on our PC even if it's under control.

The price is tempting, but the virus detection is poor. If we were buying on a budget, we would install the free ZoneAlarm firewall and complement it with Steganos AntiVirus 2006.