Ever thought about life from the perspective of a virus? It isn't a pretty picture. Stitched together from ones and zeroes coded by some permanently bored, sociopathic, over-achieving teenager, you're born into a world that really doesn't like you.

As you attempt to scurry from server to server, from USB stick to council employee's PC, you're hounded by ever more sophisticated anti-virus attack dogs. Not to mention crushing rings of firewalls. And then programs like Threatfire come along that make an already hostile environment an even more perilous proposition.

This freeware effort from PC Tools is designed to reinforce your main anti-virus protection by providing additional behavioural detection. This means that it monitors the processes and programs running on your PC, looking for suspicious activity. If Threatfire detects any odd behaviour, it quarantines the relevant files before they can do any damage.

In other words, this handy little utility can act against viruses when they've popped out fresh into the wild, rather than waiting for outbreaks to be tackled with virus definition updates. Because however short the wait for an update may be - and some anti-virus suites are very swift these days - even the slightest delay could potentially be critical.

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Threatfire is designed to run with a minimum of bother and a very light system footprint. It automatically updates itself, throws up very few dialogue boxes, and generally keeps itself to itself. We monitored our system load before and after installation, under normal and heavy workload conditions, and indeed claims of its light resource usage were borne out. It worked in tandem with our existing anti-virus (G Data) with no conflicts, in fact we barely even noticed it was running at all.

Alongside the behavioural monitoring, Threatfire also contains a Rootkit scanner with quick and full scan modes. The latter took 20 minutes to sift through 100GB of data and our registry, while in quick mode that time was reduced slightly to 15 minutes. This is useful extra protection, and scans can be scheduled using the program. There's also an option that makes Threatfire set up a restore point before any files are quarantined, just in case anything goes awry.

If you wish to use Threatfire for commercial or business purposes, then you have to purchase the licensed version (which also has a few more configuration options and telephone support). However, this free version gives you full coverage otherwise, and really is a quality addition to your PC's defence network. As an added bonus, the program's taskbar icon is a flame which flickers when it's working away scanning. Well, we liked it anyway.

As a free extra security buffer for your computer, Threatfire proves itself most worthy. It creates only minor additional system overheads, and as well as behavioural detection routines it contains a rootkit scanner.