Tips to protect your desktop PCs and laptops

Rahul Sah

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Quick Heal Total Security 2007 is a personal Internet security solution for desktop PCs or notebooks, to protect against spyware, adware and dangerous bots that creep into a system from the Internet.

It's the elder brother of Quick Heal AntiVirus 2007 (reviewed May 2007, pg 128) with some additional features such as AntiSpam, Data Theft Protection, Hijack restore and Track cleaner.

Quick Heal Anti Virus uses DNAScan technology. This is a technique that uses a deep code inspection and code analysis technique, and characterizes patterns of malware and viruses. This helps the software handle frequent virus outbreaks and blocks latest viruses or malwares even if its virus signatures database has not been updated.

Its 'Data Theft Protection' option prevents unauthorized copying of sensitive data from PC through removable media and comes in handy when you have a shared computer.

The 'Hijack Restore' option deals with problems caused by malware, which change Internet Explorer's settings. Unlike Windows XP System Restore, which restores the registry settings to a previous date, this option only restores IE's settings. Plus, it also restores system settings such as Task Manager and System Restore. Strangely, it fails to detect Mozilla Firefox browser and therefore can't restore its settings. That's a drawback for Mozilla users.

We installed the software on a Windows XP machine and scanned approx 11,000 viruses with it. It detected all viruses and deleted/cleaned them. For checking Firewall capabilities, we exposed it to DOS and port scanning attacks. It successfully blocked DOS and port scanning attacks; and maintained a detailed log of all network activities.

For e-mail protection and anti spam tests, we configured a mail account in Outlook Express and downloaded spam, and virus infected mails. It was able to delete viruses even before the mail was downloaded. While it detected upto 75-80% of the spams at the default threshold score of 100, it wasn't able to detect most of the image-based spam. However, its spam detection capability can be improved by varying its threshold score, which ranges from 0-5000.

The lower threshold score implies better spam protection. However, this didn't work for image based spam even after we lowered the threshold of the Spam filter to zero.

Bottomline: Considering its price and efficient online threat handling, a good buy for all desktop users