There's something that got our back up fairly early, albeit temporarily, where PC Tools Antivirus Free was concerned. Granted, just by the product that we're talking about that may sound a little churlish, yet it's another in the increasing line of software products that, mid-installation, ‘recommends' another program you might want to install on your machine.

This time it's not the Yahoo! Toolbar or something of that ilk; instead it's a copy of Registry Mechanic. Now we've nothing against Registry Mechanic, and are content that it's a sound application, but we can't help but think that if we wanted a copy of Registry Mechanic downloaded onto our machine, we'd find one. Tsk.

Anyway, where the free-of-charge anti-virus market is concerned, it's generally AVG that gets the nod. Yet we've long been bothered about the system overhead of AVG, and mid-scan we've had more than one PC become borderline unusable when putting it to work. It was time to hunt down a replacement.

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PC Tools Antivirus installed quite briskly and then, as is the norm, it immediately went hunting for updates. In our case it found a 17MB database update it needed to get hold of, so we let it get to work..

Then we found ourselves at the quite bright and logically laid out main screen. We opted for a scan, and the program offers three levels to choose from. There's a quick intelli-scan that just goes over the critical points of your system, a full scan which does the lot, and a customisable scan.

The intelli-scan was completed in just over four minutes on our testbed laptop, with no sign of slowdown whatsoever. So we set it to work on the full scan, and this too at first gave the impression that it was going to be completed in a surprisingly swift amount of time, with the progress bar at one point looking like it was on steroids.

Soon, however, it got down to the clutter of a day-to-day system and nearly two hours had passed before it completed its scan. To its credit, this didn't hit system overhead and we were able to work quite easily while the software was doing its business. It also picked up nasties that the quick scan missed.

Unusually for a free application, there's also real time protection included. This is in the guise of IntelliGuard, and it guards against e-mail, memory and file infections. If it picks anything up a dialogue window pops up, offering you the choice as to what to do next. It's all very logically handled.

PC Tools Antivirus Free isn't perfect, though. It seemed to have a panic mentality to it: a couple of perfectly legitimate installation files were alerted to us as potential malware, and only after some research online did we realise it was worrying us unnecessarily. Furthermore, it's not - you're probably realised - the swiftest of tools, and we'd be wary of over-relying on the program's quick scan.

But it certainly, for our (lack of) money, fared better than AVG and is a solid alternative to it. It's also a good choice for beginners, with a comfortable interface to it, and we were confident it'd keep the virulent nasties of the world safely at bay.

A solid anti-virus option if there's no budget whatsoever to spend. It's not perfect, but in the free market it's as good as you're going to get.