The Panda interface is much the same as previous incarnations, even down to the misspelled ‘phising’ on one screen. That’s a shame, as it could do with an overhaul. Although the system status screen is informative, you can end up with numerous screens on the go if you start drilling down beyond this. Panda has followed the ‘simple’ path in some areas, though — the firewall, for example. While not being as truly silent as Norton’s, it’s adopted a strictly behavioural-analysis strategy. This does away with the myriad confirmation pop-ups, and didn’t block anything we wanted to have access to, nor allow anything malicious to do so.

Unfortunately, if an application is mistakenly blocked for displaying ‘dangerous behaviour’, the only evident solution is to submit it to Panda for clearance. Unlike AVG, the firewall is also difficult to turn off, so much so that we didn’t succeed by attacking the Registry, Task Manager or even turning off various services. The firewall also includes a wireless network-intrusion detector, which worked well in our tests, and can even report missing security patches.

The anti-spyware performance was distinctly average — well below the standard of Webroot Spy Sweeper, and lagging behind Norton and F-Secure as well. TruPrevent comes to the rescue when attempting to infect a clean system, but check this has been installed, as we discovered the ‘smart install’ system won’t do so by default if system memory is below 500MB. This provides real-time behavioural protection for emerging threats, and is an essential component of a modern security suite. Although it can be added manually after installation, we’d prefer it was included by default, or the minimum system specs revised accordingly.

Also not installed by default, acceptably so this time, are the parental controls. These work well, although you have to create specific Panda accounts, as it doesn’t pick up your Windows user ones. Since filtering is done in the HTML stream, it doesn’t matter which browser client is used, but there’s no time-limited access option. The spam filtering, like AVG, didn’t produce a single false positive during our testing, but was just as poor when it came to letting spam through the defences: 510 (17 percent) of our spam emails bypassed it. Unlike AVG, diverting spam in Outlook is handled automatically. There’s some basic data-privacy control, but no browser-based anti-phishing protection of the kind you’ll find with Norton or McAfee suites.

The Panda system footprint is small at 160MB of free space and 128MB of memory. Although not as resource-friendly as AVG, it performs much better than either Trend Micro or Norton in this regard, and is on a par with the A-Listed F-Secure. But, despite being good value for money, Panda is the same price as F-Secure, and it can’t match it in terms of performance.