F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007 review

Looking much the same as previous versions, F-Secure's latest anti-virus software has a clean interface with straightforward sliders to control security levels and lots of options for setting scheduled scans and automatic updates.

There's a lot going on behind the simple facade, however, so you'll need a reasonably fast computer on which to run it.

F-Secure's anti-virus software has done consistently well in our tests for the past few years, detecting some of the more obscure or disguised samples we've used to bamboozle anti-virus software. With this in mind, we were surprised to see how it performed when scanning our virus-infected emails. Although its 78 per cent detection rate was better than most, and significantly superior to the likes of Avast! or PC-cillin, it wasn't close to the 90 per cent mark achieved by Kaspersky Anti-Virus and Steganos, both of which use Kaspersky technology. F-Secure's result is strange because its software combines a number of anti-virus engines, including Kaspersky's.

F-Secure Anti-Virus did well in the web-based threat test, detecting 43 per cent of the files. Combined with the email score this places its average detection rating well ahead of that achieved by McAfee VirusScan and Norton AntiVirus. While this program detected a total of 78 web-based threats, only 58 of these were discovered by the web scanner. We had to run a manual scan to find the other 20. All the other programs missed files with their web scanners then found them with a manual scan but, with the exception of AVG, F-Secure missed and then subsequently found the most.

This product's price is not the lowest, but it does include a licence to install the software on three PCs. As more of us have multiple PCs at home, this could save a fair amount of money in the long run. With its relatively good virus and spyware detection, F-Secure is one of the best we've seen but is beaten by cheaper and more accurate anti-virus products.