Panda Internet Security 2009

The 2008 edition of Panda’s Internet Security suite didn’t get a glowing review from us. We weren’t able to install it on a PC using Windows Vista, and although we did manage to install it on an older machine using Windows XP, performance was sluggish.

This 2009 version addresses some of those problems, although it was still slow at times. We had no problems installing it on Windows XP or Vista, and the program took just half an hour to do a complete scan of our 120GB hard disk – against an hour for the previous edition.

Its anti-virus and anti-spyware features worked very well. The program picked up a number of viruses that we intentionally installed on the test PC, and even picked up a rogue piece of spyware that had escaped our notice. The fee covers installation on three PCs, and includes a year’s worth of updates to tackle new viruses as they come along. Just remember that you’ll need to renew your subscription at the end of one year if you want to keep receiving updates.

There’s also a web content filter that you can use to block unsuitable websites, although we had trouble setting this up. The program provided a series of filters for different levels of protection – for instance, filters for young children, or adult employees who might be using the web at work.

However, when selecting these filters we sometimes found that web access was completely blocked, while at other times the filter wouldn’t block websites at all. The online Help files didn’t really clarify the matter for us, and it took some rather tedious trial and error before we got it working properly.

We also found that our PC was slower to start up after installing the Panda software – startup time increased from 55 seconds to 90 seconds – and that the Panda control panel would sometimes seem to freeze for a few seconds after we had adjusted some of its settings.

So while Panda does provide good protection and security when you’re online, there’s still room to improve the program’s speed a little, and also to improve the documentation for home users who aren’t familiar with this type of software.