Whilst antivirus solutions may no longer be considered a silver bullet, in the current and increasing wave of on-line eCrime and Fraud, malicious code, including Trojans, viruses, worms, not to mention those malicious sites posing an ever present danger to on-line security. A well maintained, up-to-date antivirus application MUST be considered essential armour for the Laptop, or PC.

Here one very well respected solution to defend our Home and Office systems arrives out of the cold depths of Russia from the Kaspersky Labs Kaspersky do not want to complicate things with several products. They have only two offers aimed at home users, Anti-virus and Internet Security, now in version 2009. Anti-virus protects against most of today's threats that can attack your computer. When you want to be safe against traditional file based viruses, spyware, email viruses or web ones, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2009 can handle it with ease. If you need complete protection you may want to look at their Internet Security product.

To evaluate its effectiveness, options and capabilities we ran three evaluations, on three different platforms. 1) A Mobile Dell XPS Laptop running Windows Vista Ultimate, using WiFi, Bluetooth, and Public Hot Spots, 2) A Dell Workstation running Vista Business connected to a LAN, and last but to least, for the home user, 3) A Dell PC running Vista Standard connected to an 802.11g Hub, and onward to the potentially hostile space of the Internet.

Installation of the Kaspersky application itself was reasonably easy, albeit, an annoyance was encountered on the Home System, generated by the former AVG antivirus product, which presented somewhat of a challenge to uninstall (see Note below). That said the remainder where running MacAfee antivirus, and uninstall and update to Kaspersky went without a hitch. All default options used provide good security and wont affect your computer's performance. We liked simple view of main options with easy switch to more advanced options. Unlike with some other products there are not scheduled scans installed by default but you have the option to change this to run daily.

We also upgraded from a previous version, this worked like a charm and as long as you still have valid license, you do not need spend a penny. Kaspersky updated itself to version 2009 with almost no interaction from us.

We liked website content scanning that can recognise malicious content even within well known sites. The product of course protects against known malicious sites, though we would like to see something similar to McAfee's SiteAdvisor.

We also liked unique feature that scans your computer for out-dated software and highlights all applications that need updating. You might be surprised what relics are stored on your harddisk. Let's make some cleaning.

Having now run with the product for three weeks, it was found it to be very stable, effective at stopping malicious content, and in fact upon the complete scan of the Dell Mobile system, it actually located some malicious content which had been missed by the previous product. Another impressive aspect of the Kaspersky solution was the flexibility and wide range of configuration options which may be applied - all easy to understand, allowing the security-bar to be shifted both up and down to meet the user expectations.

As you would expect from a top shelf product, Kaspersky comes along with On-Line Anti Phishing, Anti Malware protection, as well as what they refer to as Proactive Defence, providing protection from Key Loggers, Hidden Driver Installs, O/S Kernel Modifications, Hidden Objects (Malicious), as well as protection against Hidden Processes. The Kaspersky solution in its 2009 guise also comes with an Application Filtering Firewall component, which when run with the other proactive defences provides a high degree of in-depth control aligned enabled monitoring of events.

For the those parents who wish to protect their young from the dangers of unfettered access to the Internet, Kaspersky also provision the capability of Parental Control, which may be locked down with a system password.

The Kaspersky antivirus solution enjoys extremely frequent updates, which the box informs, if available, are pulled down every hour, a feature we liked, as this we see as a better practice for minimising the risk posed from by Zero Day Threats (as 1 hour is much more solid than 1 day (or more)).

Overall, we found that the Kasperskey AV solution did exactly what it said on the tin (or in this case box), and provided a level of protection commensurate with all expectations, on all evaluated platforms. In fact, so impressed was the reviewer (me) with the Kaspersky solution it will be remaining installed on my systems to afford them protection – furthermore I have since been back to my supplier, and now all of my systems, servers, and assets are protected by Kaspersky!

The most impressive thing of all, we the price – in this case the original three user licence which were purchased from PC World, along with annual support and updates the cost was less than £20 (that represent 0.018 pence per day for each machine). However we think Kaspersky Internet security 2009, only £10 more, offers better value.

Note: A number of antivirus solutions have been noted not to do a complete a clean uninstall, leaving the system populated with remnants of the old application resulting in the new antivirus product objecting to the presence of another AV solution on the same host (as was the case here). We at SS are certain that this is just bad clean up practice of the vendor uninstall. However, in order to allow free competition, and ease of operation, along with satisfactory product removal, we would urge the guilty culprits of such AV solutions to clean up their uninstall process for the sake of their public.