PC Tools AntiVirus 

PC Tools Antivirus protects your PC from viruses, malware programs, Trojan horses and prevents unwanted access to your private data over the Internet. The program can scan your hard drives, running programs and Window’s temporary folders for viruses or any kind of infection from Internet threats. The program also carries an e-mail scanner that can supervise all your incoming and outgoing e-mails from Outlook Express to prevent virus attacks coming through the attachments that you receive and send with your e-mails.

The program also has a browser-, cookie-, file-, network-, process-, site- and startup-guard, out of which only the file-guard and the e-mail-guard work in this free program. To make use of the rest of the tools, you need to upgrade by purchasing Spyware Doctor, which comes with PC Tools Antivirus embedded. Rest all the things, including the very easy and user-friendly interface, the action logs, the scan scheduler and the automatic updates prove it a fully-functioning antivirus for Windows.

The one and only disadvantage of the program is its typical installation, which is hard to follow for novice users. The program needs an Internet connection to download 90 MB of updates after the installation process has finished, and without these updates the program will not run. Therefore, if you want to use this antivirus on a PC with no Internet connection, then you should stop reading this text and search for some other antivirus tool. If your PC is connected to the Internet, then you will have to run your PC in safe-mode with “networking support” to install the updates. Shortly, the program is a total headache, if you want to buy. I have seen the same problem in most of the programs from this developer and, besides, the program has nothing that makes it a unique security tool against viruses.

In a nutshell, the program is an antivirus tool with very basic features and an easy user interface. However, the installation of the program may bother you.