With people exploring further afield and leaving traces of their personal details all over the Internet (sometimes willingly, sometimes not), it’s more important than ever to stay safe. The trouble is, too many security programs wrap themselves around your browser, email and programs and just clog up the works: and to us, one of the secrets of good security software is that it looks after you with a light touch, like one of Beyonce’s bodyguards.
In terms of user experience, Webroot Internet Security Complete (WISC) is a product transformed. Out go the regimented buttons and dialogues of old Webroot programs and in come softer, animated panels, complete with a simple traffic light system which highlights the different components as green (good) orange (there’s a security-related message waiting) and red (something needs sorting out right now).
Out of the box you get a virus/malware scanner, real-time protection when launching programs, visiting web sites, and opening e-mails (in Outlook and Outlook Express only), a system cleaner (that also makes deleted files unrecoverable) a program for storing and creating hard-to-crack passwords and an auto-complete feature for filling in web forms. In addition, this new version has sync and sharing features which come courtesy of SugarSync, a highly-rated Dropbox performalike, that provides 10GB of online storage for backup, synchronising files, sharing photo libraries and so on.
Although it lacks the utter simplicity of Dropbox, the Magic Briefcase feature comes close, and any file or folder dropped inside it becomes available to any other machine linked to the same WISC account. You can install the standard version reviewed here on up to three machines.
Above and beyond all the new sync and share features, the makeover turns this into a program that you’ll want to use and it’s well supported by a short series of excellent video tutorials which do an admirable job of explaining the main features. In addition, the default settings make most of the decisions for you, so anyone who doesn’t fancy rummaging around to tweak some obscure anti-spam setting probably doesn’t need to. There’s the occasional annoying warning when a program wants to do something Webroot thinks is suspicious, but once dismissed, it won’t come back
Remember that what you’re buying here is a licence to use the program and a subscription to various updates: you can run the version reviewed here on up to three PCs (sharing the 10GB of online storage between them) and get a year’s worth of updates for under £50; after that you’ll have to renew your subscription.
We had a couple of hiccups. First, the installation dialogue simply disappears part way through the process leaving you wondering whether it’s still doing anything (it was, as we discovered when we tried to launch the program). Second, away from our home network we couldn’t access the Internet and therefore couldn’t register, get at our shared storage and so on: unfortunately, WISC didn’t even display an error message, but just sat there doing nothing.
Webroot Internet Security Complete is available in a lite version as well which doesn’t include any of the password manager stuff and has only 2GB of storage but frankly, for this price, it’s well worth getting the real thing.
Company: Webroot
Contact: 0845 0822 498