It may sound a like a new toothpaste, but Total Protection 2008 is designed to keep a bit more than your molars in check. This latest version of McAfee's flagship Internet security suite offers no fewer than a dozen different defences to keep your PC safe.

The package includes updated versions of the company's personal firewall, improved anti-spam filters and a tweaked anti-virus engine. There's also spyware removal and phishing e-mail recognition to prevent users falling victim to online scams.

New this time around are secure drag-and-drop file sharing between networked PCs, automated backup and system maintenance tools. The suite also offers parental controls and Web site filtering, plus a shredder for permanently erasing sensitive documents.

Installation went smoothly and, happily, our system's start-up time was affected only by a matter of around 15 seconds. Some parts of the suite are provided as separate applications but most features are controlled from the main SecurityCenter window. This makes setting everything up quicker and, while it's not quite as easy to use as, say, Trend Internet Security, the interface is straightforward.

McAfee's virus engine is respected worldwide and is actually licensed by some rivals - this latest edition has already achieved approval from the renowned security software testers at ICSA Labs. Unfortunately, it's not the fastest around: a scan of 360GB of data took just over 38 minutes on our Athlon64-based Vista test system.

Scans can be customised to speed things up and McAfee supports heuristic as well as signature-based detection. Updates are provided daily. E-mail anti-virus and spam detection works across POP3, MAPI and Web-based accounts.

Firewall access for common applications and utilities is set automatically, helping to keep those annoying alerts to a minimum. Those that do appear are easy to understand and it's easy to set rules for new programs. The firewall doesn't offer quite the same level of detail as, say, Agnitum's Outpost Pro, but tweakers still have plenty to play with. There's also a game mode option to suppress alerts during that all-important headshot.

Parents will be pleased with the option of parental controls and SiteAdvisor Plus, which alert users to potential dodgy links. The latter is impressive but the former easily bypassed: it may block known sites but a simple Google image search quickly produced adult pictures. Scanning image names might help here.

The new system and backup tools work as you might expect. There's not a lot here that you can't already do easily in Windows, but it is handy to have these things in one place.

There's still only a single-user licence in the box but McAfee's latest policy lets users upgrade to any new versions, free of charge, within a 12-month subscription period. Additional user codes can currently be purchased at £5 each to cover family PCs.

Easy to use and comprehensive, McAfee's tools will remain a popular choice for online protection. The new system tools don't really offer anything special and we'd like to see a multi-user licence at this price, but if you're looking for a one-stop, all-round level of protection, this is it.