AVG Internet Security 8.0 is the latest version of the complete home security package from the company that made a name for itself by offering powerful, free antivirus software to the masses. It's a pretty comprehensive suite of tools designed to protect all areas of your system, with a particular emphasis on online threats.

During installation you can choose to enable the AVG Security Toolbar, which uses the LinkScanner component to allow for real-time protection against malicious Web pages and automatic downloads. You also have the option here to perform a software and definition update, and create a schedule for automatic scanning.

It's a pretty fast process, and before long you're taken to the main interface, where you can monitor the level of protection via a set of 12 icons covering areas such as anti-virus, anti-spyware and the firewall. You can turn each of these components on and off individually to customise your level of security, but strangely certain components such as anti-virus or anti-spam don't appear to offer any customisation features, instead simply reporting whether the component is up to date.

In order to tweak your preferences in these more obscure areas you'll need to trawl through an advanced settings menu, which isn't particularly friendly and doesn't really make the software any easier to use.

To enable the firewall you'll need to run an initial wizard to generate a configuration file for your machine. This scans your computer to find out what applications should be allowed access to the Internet, so is a necessary process to prevent you from being bombarded with confirmation requests.

Again this is straightforward enough, but again you'll find that you appear to get little control over how applications and components are managed. To change priorities or access levels you'll need to go through another advanced menu, which, while offering a good degree of control and fine-tuning - including the ability to configure adapters, system and network services - isn't particularly clear or as nice to use as the more traditional structure offered by most rivals.

Results of a full system scan were pretty good. Although most of the detected items were Internet cookies, it did pick up all of the malicious ‘test' files we copied onto the system to try to trip it up. It's worth noting here that AVG installs most of its components as separate processes, which, while a little frustrating from a clutter point of view, doesn't actually slow your system down too badly. Processor usage rarely ventured beyond about 50 percent during a full scan, and only on occasion did we notice system slowdown when performing other tasks.

When you fire up a Web browser you'll see the AVG Toolbar, which if enabled will scan each site returned by a search query for potentially malicious content and show a green tick to indicate that it's safe to visit. Any sites you visit directly are also scanned before they're loaded, so you get a good degree of protection here.

We were left with mixed feelings about AVG 8.0. On one hand it seems to want to appear nicely automated and easy for beginners, since many of the more advanced options are tucked away. On the other hand the list of individual security tools does seem rather verbose, and we weren't particularly impressed by the way the interface is put together.

But performance does seem quite good, there's a comprehensive range of security, and automatically monitoring your system or performing scans doesn't appear to be too resource-hungry.

The main issue we have with AVG is that many rivals offer similar levels of security and similarly efficient scanning with a much friendlier interface, and in the light of capable competitors such as ZoneAlarm, it's not quite up to scratch as an all-rounder.