We immediately warmed to Steganos Internet Security 2006. It has manners. Whereas some products of its ilk would instantly have you installing every tool they had to offer in one go, Steganos doesn't work like that. You pick exactly what you want and leave what you don't. Radical thinking it ain't, but it scores highly where many software publishers fail, and that's in the simple courtesy stakes. Bizarrely, the one thing that actually is missing is the option to install the lot.

So, you choose which of the five key components to go for: there's AntiVirus, Personal Firewall, AntiSpyware, AntiSpam and AntiDialer. Let's take them in that order.

AntiVirus 2006 is, according to Steganos, a program that takes up a small amount of system resources. Anyone who has had an anti-virus application slow their PC to a virtual crawl (and we've fallen prey to this too) will immediately appreciate this. We certainly did, for whilst the scanning took a little time, we happily multitasked while it did its work with, at worst, very occasional slowdown. As a comparison we tried the same scan with AVG and, while the results were the same, there were moments when our testbed PC was struggling to do all we asked of it.

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Personal Firewall 2006 offers few surprises. It's easily customisable, so you can set your security level and how much you want to interact with the program, and then you leave it to get on with its work. There's nothing radical here either; the default is that a dialog box pops up every time a new application wants Internet access, and the options you're presented with are straightforward enough. But it picked up attempted intrusions and a selection of external firewall testing tools failed to penetrate its defences, all with the minimum of fuss from the software.

AntiSpam 2006 continues Steganos's open and straightforward line. On the installation menu, it openly admits that "if your e-mail provider uses a spam filter already, it will be sufficient in most cases." And that proved to be the case. It's a perfectly effective utility, but generally offers something the majority of us already have.

AntiSpyware 2006 proved sweet, though, doing its work in a fast, effective and user-friendly manner. It likes to be kept open all of the time to hold already-running processes under control, and we weren't keen on the fact that there seemed no way to rid our PC of some of them. For the most part, it worked a treat. AdAware, though, is still our application of choice in this field, although we are keeping AntiSpyware 2006 installed as an alternative option.

Finally, AntiDialler 2006 does pretty much what it says. It's only applicable for dial-up users, and it offers a line of defence against rogue programs that surreptitiously have you dialling premium rate Web access lines without your consent.

We warmed to Steganos Internet Security 2006 a lot during our tests. While we weren't convinced that any of the individual applications were market leaders, we did like the way it went about its business, and how the program treated us. It bothered to explain things, it was honest and realistic throughout and, crucially, once we'd got it all set up, we could just leave it running with little or no maintenance.

This is an efficient and effective suite of security tools, presented in a very user-friendly manner. There's nothing ground-breaking in this package, but it's presented in a sensible manner and it works well.