The F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007 antivirus software offers a great deal of protection for the money. You can run its antivirus and anti-spyware tools at the same time or, for greater flexibility, configure them to run independently. This is a good thing, because F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007 suffers from slow to barely average scanning speeds. Breaking up the scans delivers a slight performance boost.

Installation is straightforward, although we recommend you review the installation instructions first, something many of us are disinclined to do. F-Secure recommends physically disconnecting your network connection for the installation process. The installer will restart your computer for you when it's finished, even if you don't want it to, so be sure you're not doing anything else except installing the program.

When installation is complete, you can reconnect your network. F-Secure will automatically search the developer's web site and download program updates. It's important for anti-virus software to be up to date, but as with the restart during installation, we would prefer more control over, or at least advance notification of, this initial update process.

After it updates itself, F-Secure Anti-Virus gets down to what it does best: protecting you from rogue applications, viruses, worms, Trojans, rootkits and spyware. We like the breadth of security issues it covers, including scanning both incoming and outgoing mail.

The user interface is a fairly typical two-pane view. The left pane displays a collection of objects; the right pane changes to show the details of the object you select in the left pane. The interface is easy to navigate, and should require few, if any, visits to the manual.

One of the most important aspects of anti-virus software is how frequently and how quickly its virus definitions are updated. F-Secure has received numerous awards in the past for the timeliness of its virus definition updates. There's no reason to doubt that the company will continue to excel in this area.

F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007 is easy to use antivirus software that delivers well-regarded protection from many types of computer threats, including viruses and spyware.


Pros: Includes antivirus and anti-spyware tools, easy to configure and easy to use
Cons: Setup requires disconnecting your computer from your network, slow scanning speeds