GFI Vipre Antivirus Premium Lifetime Edition

Most anti-virus programs make people buy the product and then pay an annual renewal fee.

GFI has taken a step back to the ‘good old days' with the Lifetime Edition of its latest software, offering non-expiring protection for a single PC.

This special edition is available from Amazon.

The Vipre software was created by Sunbelt Software, which GFI bought in 2010 – there are still lots of references to Sunbelt scattered through the software.

The program includes anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall protection. We installed it with little fuss (it warns about removing existing anti-virus and firewall programs), and after restarting a setup wizard appeared, to guide us through the settings. These include enabling email protection and configuring the firewall, and at the end there's a useful short video explaining the software.

The firewall has three modes – disabled, simple and learning. Simple mode blocks most incoming connections without informing the user (you can allow programs through the firewall manually), whereas Learning mode pesters the user with dialogue boxes asking whether it should allow or block any web connection that's being made – this will be very annoying for less experienced users, as the information presented is rather technical.

It's a shame there's nothing between these two extremes, although to be fair the firewall is very powerful, with lots of advanced features such as filtering of malicious websites and protection against phishing.

It used very little memory (between about seven and 50MB on our test PC, depending on whether a scan was running or not) and didn't hog the processor's power while scanning, so it's a good choice for less-powerful computers. It also includes a secure file eraser, a system information tool and a history cleaner.

The interface was clear and simple, and the default settings were fairly well chosen. Advanced users can tweak many settings, and there's plenty of information available in the help file. If you're fed up with forking out protection money every year, take a look at the free trial version (from www.vipreantivirus.com) to see how you like it.