All products reviewed are put through a testing phase where certain key aspects of the program are evaluated. We evaluate each program under the following circumstances:
- A Pentium Celeron 1000 Mhz Desktop computer on an Asus TUSI-M Motherboard, with a 7.5GB Western Digital Hard Disk, 256MB of PCI 133 Mhz SDR RAM and an onboard display adapter with 64MB of video memory.
- The computer is pre-infected with several, randomly selected, malicious programs including Worms, Trojans, Viruses, Spyware, Adware and Key-loggers.
We do not use a high-performance computer and infect the system before loading the security software in order to test their effectiveness of taking over an infected system and how they disinfect the system with limited resources available to them. If they perform well on low-end systems, you can be certain that they will perform exceptionally well on high-end systems.
We evaluate each product against the following criteria:
- Installation (all products)
- Automatic Updating (all products)
- Real-time Protection (only anti-virus and anti-spyware products)
- Resource Usage (all products)
- Isolation of Threats (only anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall products)
- Interface (all products)
- Scanning & Healing (only anti-virus and anti-spyware products)
- Filtering & Effectiveness (only spam filters and anti-spam products)
- Un-installation (all products)
We have divided our reviews into the following sections:
Anti-virus and Anti-Spyware Software Reviews
Firewall Reviews
Spam Filters and Anti-Spam Software Reviews
Parental Control Software Reviews
Other Reviews
Below is a list of anti-virus and anti-spyware products we have reviewed so far:
- Active Virus Shield (AVS)
- Ad-Aware
- avast! Home Edition
- avast! Internet Security
- AVG Anti-virus
- AVG Anti-virus + Firewall
- AVG Anti-Malware
- AVG Anti-Spyware
- AVG Internet Security
- BitDefender Internet Security
- Kaspersky Internet Security
- Kaspersky Anti-Virus
- HijackThis
- Outpost Security Suite Pro
- Spybot - Search & Destroy
Below is a list of firewall products we have reviewed so far:
- AVG Firewall Component
- BitDefender Firewall Component
- Kaspersky Firewall Component
- Lavasoft Personal Firewall
- Outpost Firewall Pro
- ZoneAlarm Firewall Free Edition
Below is a list of anti-spam and spam filtering products we have reviewed so far:
- AVG Anti-Spam Component (Spamcatcher)
- BitDefender Anti-Spam Component
- Kaspersky Anti-Spam Component
- MailWasher PRO
- Spam Bully
- SPAMfighter PRO
- Mozilla Thunderbird Spam Filter
Below is a list of parental control products we have reviewed so far:
- BitDefender Parental Control Component
- Kaspersky Parental Control Component
- PC Pandora Monitoring Software
Below is a list of other products we have reviewed so far. Each product are reviewed against a different set of criteria and not a predefined set like the categories above:
