To paraphrase a politician whose career isn't having its finest moments right now, Kaspersky's Internet Security 2010 is a serious application for serious times. Professionally presented from the off, it's a suite of utilities for battling ...

A strong package, and one that continues to improve. Some nice new features, and an all-round professional job that covers most of what the majority of people are likely to worry about in terms of PC security.

Norton Utilities is, strangely enough, a suite of utility programs designed with your machine's health in mind. They encompass a range of system diagnosis, cleaning and optimisation tools, with all the programs neatly ensconced inside the ...

Norton Utilities provides a reasonable set of tools for disk cleaning and registry housekeeping, and the optimisation wizard adds a little zip to some application loading times. However, it's light on features compared to rivals such as System ...

You can make your PC secure in a number of ways, some of which are more effective than others. Gluing green fuzzy felt all over it and mounting a beak in one of the drive bays ...

A top notch security suite which is pretty much install and forget, with a good, broad range of features. Its anti-virus capabilities shine particularly strongly, although the trade-off is longer scan times. Still, that's well worth the compromise in ...

Norton 360 has done a great job of distinguishing itself from Norton Internet Security as a powerful and feature-packed alternative aimed more at novices, and although the latest version doesn't offer any drastic improvements in terms ...

Despite the fact that there aren't many major additions in terms of features and components in this year's version, the overall improvement is dramatic enough to help Norton 360 maintain its reputation in this market. Symantec has done an excellent ...

When it comes to internet security, there's one company that will panda to your needs. And will doubtless never, ever use that pun in a press release. At any rate, Panda's latest net security suite has ...

Panda's effort at net security gives the user solid protection, a fairly broad feature set, and you can pick it up for a reasonable price.

Corel Painter is the leading natural media painting program for Windows and over the years its feature-set has expanded with each new version. Its range of brushes, markers and other drawing tools makes very good use ...

The new features in Painter 11 are good to have and may make you more productive, particularly if you regularly move between Painter and Photoshop, but it still feels more like Painter X.5. At £137, the upgrade is reasonably priced and, even for new ...

Trend Micro is a long established name in the PC security fraternity, even if it doesn't carry quite as much weight as the Nortons of the world. The company has just released its latest net security ...

The core protection modules are sound and there are some novel touches here. It's not one of the cheapest security suites we've come across but there are some handy extras thrown in, particularly if you want an anti-virus solution for your mobile ...

Nuance is now the only major software house producing speech recognition software, so those interested in talking to their PCs must either go with it or resort to the engine included with Windows Vista. While the ...

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 is an improvement on version 9 in speed and probably accuracy. The command extensions for controlling the 'net and searches are useful and some of the command simplifications are welcome. The program could do with an ...

Taking steps to ensure that your PC is sufficiently protected against threats is a must these days, and there's a range of suites and tools around to help. What's frustrating is when you hear of a ...

ZoneAlarm Forcefield is nicely automated, unobtrusive and doesn't force itself upon you, in that you can choose to browse normally if you want to. There appeared to be no significant overheads on the system in terms of performance, and based on the ...

Acronis has built an impressive and deserved reputation in the system backup and security market with its True Image series, and has built a range of worthwhile improvements into the latest version. True Image 11 is ...

The usability, flexibility and wealth of additional features available with True Image 11 will offer any user total peace of mind when it comes to protecting their data and establishing an effective recovery solution. There are some excellent new ...