Review by Derek G

I decided to knock off a star as their marketing claims it’s easy to use. My experience with the product indicates otherwise. That’s not to say it’s worse than the others, but there are some aggravating features you will encounter when using it.

It is designed to work on Windows 2000 SP4, XP, and Vista with 150MB of free hard disk space. No comprehensive manual is included in the retail box, just a tiny installation guide with some basics of what the different features do. Instead they give you a thick notepad of blank paper for some odd reason. I expect the added weight of shipping this notepad costs the company more than the notepad itself. Strange addition, but whatever, I used it to jot down notes for this review.

Installation is a rather long and laborious process that required more reboots than any other program I’ve used. We’re used to the standard reboot after installation. For some reason, I had to reboot this software three times. In addition, following one of the reboots, a warning message popped up asking me whether I wanted to allow a certain program to execute. This brings up one of the gripes I have about almost all of the security programs out there. They may be good at flagging potential problems but they’re bad at helping you make an informed decision and PC Tools is no exception. It gave me the filename and I was able to determine where it was located on my hard drive, but while I was searching out the file for more information the alert disappeared. It turned out to be an Intel file related to WiFi access but because PC Tools blocked it I would get an error message during startup. Figuring out how to get it to allow access turned into a hassle. I couldn’t find any information in the help file or the installation guide. Finally, I discovered the file in the firewall settings and reset the permissions to allow access. Definitely not a process that’s easy for security noobs.

My third and final reboot took almost 20 minutes. I don’t know what was happening in the background but it did seem to slow down my computer during this time in spite of already updating everything. As for the program itself, it seems to work fine once everything is running. Scans take the same amount of time as other software I’ve tested (Bitdefender, Comodo, Kaspersky) but even when you’re not scanning it seems to slow down the computer slightly. The install guide warns their real-time protection called Intelliguard can consume CPU resources but real-time protection is what you want, right? I’m not impressed with their Anti-Spam either as it seems to do little more than mark messages as spam.

Aside from these gripes it does appear to have a comprehensive list of tools it uses to prevent nasties from creeping into your system. This includes prevention against changes to browser, network, and startup settings as well and scanning for malicious attachments to incoming and outgoing email attachments. Their firewall was highly rated by a testing firm known as matousec and updates are automatic. Also, protection is allowed on up to 3 computers. Still, a lot of the features such as data handshake SPI and stealth mode you’d need to be an expert in order to figure out whether they’re working properly. It’s not as automatic as the marketing seems to imply.

My laptop has unwillingly become the testing ground for security products due to the problems I’ve experienced with the competition. In the meantime I’ve settled on Comodo Internet Security for my main PC. If I had purchased only PC Tools Internet Security I’d be happy with it once the initial setup aggravation was fixed, but the slowdown it causes my computer when it’s running is what is keeping me from switching from Comodo to it.