Labs

Panda's premium internet security suite has lots of features, including an anti-virus scanner and a firewall that provides application control. The anti-virus system is the same as that used in Panda Titanium 2006, which we tested in our anti-virus lab test in Shopper June 2006. We found this software both expensive and poor at detecting our virus samples. To justify the asking price, this package needs a seriously good firewall.

By default the firewall assumes that you are on a friendly local network and provided access to all IIS's services. Changing the

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zone setting from secure to restricted locks things down. We experienced problems when trying to create a rule to allow access to IIS. The solution was to turn off the automatic system, select IIS and specify port 80 (the default for websites) in the Advanced settings. This was not obvious.

Although we didn't look at system performance when testing these firewalls, there was a noticeable extra burden on the test system when we installed and ran Panda's product. Slow performance is a problem that many security software companies face, particularly those that provide real-time anti-virus scanners as Panda does.

Our port scan made the firewall pop up a message, but you can choose to hide these so you are not bothered by similar warnings again. The web probes went undetected when we scanned the web server.

Panda Platinum 2006 Internet Security is the most expensive internet security suite bar Kaspersky's, and it's also the most expensive to renew after the first year. With £80 you could buy two years' worth of Panda protection or three from Steganos. Steganos's firewall is better and its anti-virus program is much more effective.