Before widespread use of the Internet, computer viruses were not a common occurrence. Viruses could only be transferred via floppy disk, which meant that it was quite easy to guard against them

Viruses are really nasty. Even though this fact seems self-evident we thought it was worth reinforcing, especially as there are still a many people who seem either happy enough, or are blissfully awar

Testing anti-virus software is a tricky endeavour at the best of times, due to the inherent nasty nature of the test subject. For this anti-virus roundup, we asked independent anti-virus testing lab, AV-Test.org (www.av-test.org) to conduct the testing for us in their controlled environments. AV-Test.org has access to thousands of viruses, and is a respected anti-virus testing lab.

Fifteen security packages go head to head in our labs test, including Kaspersky, Norton, ZoneAlarm, McAfee, F-Secure and AVG. Find out which will keep you safe and which could let you down.