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. The package ships with a small instruction manual that is well illustrated and catchy enough to (shock-horror) make you want to read it.

As with any package supplied on CD, it is necessary to update it with the latest definitions upon install. If we were connected to the Internet, this would be a one-click operation. However, we chose to do the update by files, which was a cumbersome process largely because the PC-cillin files had to be manually unzipped and then copied into the correct directory. There is also no indication of how to clear the old virus definition files from the directory, so they were left there to waste space.

Aside from the manual update procedure, PC-cillin is a good package. Virus scanning is efficient and although the disinfection of some of the test files is not as effective as Norton, detection is perfect - it picked up everything we threw at it.

Unlike some of the other packages, PC-cillin integrates perfectly with Outlook to scan email already stored on the hard disk, or received over the Internet. The real-time Web scanning feature was also excellent, as it prevented infected files from being downloaded rather than waiting for the file to hit the hard disk. PC-cillin is the only package to include a Web site blocker, although without access to updated block lists, this function is more of a gimmick.

Unfortunately, PC-cillin is not without other problems. For example, it is unable to scan compressed Zip files and detect virus-like activity, making it useless against many new viruses not included in the definition files included.