Excellent value for money, but a few performance glitches let BitDefender down.

PreviewA good attempt at all-in-one system security, fully integrated into the OS.

Scanning, site blocking and alerts improved over version 6.

Kaspersky's first integrated security suite relies too much on the anti-virus component.

McAfee puts out its VirusScan 2004 in two versions - boxed or downloaded and managed from the internet. Whatever way you do it, the installation is simplicity itself with no difficult questions to answer or confusing choices to make.

Norton AntiVirus (NAV) remains the world’s most popular anti-virus program -and for good reason. It is the ideal set-and-forget anti-virus protection that is as close to idiot-proof as anyone has yet got. However, it is not the cheapest and some of its competitors, such as PC-cillin now offer more for the money.

Norman Virus Control is a very unobtrusive anti-virus program that sits in your system tray and performs much like Norton AntiVirus from Symantec. It scans all incoming emails, new files, removable media and downloaded files from the internet as a matter of course without any user interaction.

Kapersky Antivirus has been around for some time and often pops up on home computers as the uneducated user’s anti-virus software of choice. Unfortunately, it really isn’t as user friendly a program as it should be for novice users.

The unusually named NOD32 is finding favour with a growing number of users despite its Spartan interface, which concentrates more on the nuts and bolts of the job at hand than trying to look good.

Computer Associates (CA) is one of the biggest names in the software industry, even compared to Microsoft. Most of its business is done in the enterprise and corporate field, and this heritage shows in eTrust Antivirus.

A software firewall has to really stand out to succeed in the crowded market, but ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 with Web Filtering does just that.

At first glance, not much appears to have changed from version 3. A closer look, however, reveals that the engine in version 4 has been tweaked and optimised towards a more powerfully specified product.

PC-cillin 2000 is extremely easy to set up out of the box, particularly since there are few setup screens to wade through during installation. PC-cillin was one of the few packages that scanned memory and critical files before installing, thus ensuring that it did not further spread viruses on an infected system.

PC-cillin is no longer just an anti-virus program - it is a full internet security suite that includes a personal firewall and spam filtering - and it costs between $20 and $40 less than the equivalent Norton product.