This is a true all-in-one security suite, which is both good and bad.

The good part is that it comes with nearly everything you need to fend off threats, including antivirus, antispyware, antirootkit, and antiphishing tools; a firewall; and even a backup utility. The antivirus protection is excellent, and the suite also comes with a hard drive cleanup tool.

The bad part is that enabling all those features results in a noticeable performance hit in terms of boot times and overall system speed. This is still one of the better suites for total protection, but experts may want to opt for Symantec’s standalone antivirus app and assemble the rest of their protection programs separately.

Get it now: Norton 360 All-In-One Security to protect your computer.

As the name suggests, this suite focuses on privacy instead of threat management, and it is loaded with features. You can create as many virtual drives as you wish, then lock them down with real-time, 256-bit AES encryption. Another tool puts all of your email contacts, calendar data, and other information on the secure drive. You can configure any of these secure drives to open as soon as Windows boots, provided that you supply the proper passphrase, making them easy to work with throughout the day. The utility then resecures your files when the computer shuts down. A File Manager utility also lets you encrypt individual files or entire folders and can even hide them.

The included shredder is terrific, offering manual or scheduled secure deletion of both free space and any files or folders you choose. It can use a variety of algorithms, including Gutmann. A password manager makes it easy to use secure multiple passwords without worrying about forgetting them. Overall, this collection makes an excellent companion for your anti-spyware and antivirus tools.

Click to protect your computer, Steganos Security Suite 2007 Encryption AES 256. Get it now

The Numbers application in iWorks rattled the spreadsheet universe. Now Bento, from Apple subsidiary FileMaker, succeeds in shaking up another world. But this inexpensive personal database lacks a few major features, and some of its powers require OS X Leopard, which excludes a lot of users. Sometimes, too, Bento’s zeal for simplicity introduces confusion, does the word database so terrorize users that we have to substitute the murkier library?

Since creating libraries doesn’t take much effort: Either choose from one of 24 templates, like such as home inventory, expenses, digital media collections, and classwork or build a library from scratch using 19 data types, including a media field that lets you add a tune, video, or photo to library records. Libraries based on your Address Book and iCal data appear automatically, and any changes you make to that data in Bento will be reflected in those programs. Smart Collections can create sub-libraries of items that meet whatever criteria you’ve specified. To design an entry form, just drag a field to the program’s center window.

The main problem with Bento is that it doesn’t play too well with others: You can’t easily share libraries, and you can import or export data only via CSV (comma-separated values) files. But if you just need a single-user database for keeping track of class projects, CD collections, or the like, Bento will be to your taste.

Product via Bento

With its well-thought-out set of protection levels, Comodo Personal Firewall (CPF) Pro 3.0 can conform to the needs of any user, from novice to super-geek. It also has a sleek new interface and uses significantly less memory than its predecessor. Best of all, it is free, not just for noncommercial use but for any use, and the company assures us that it will remain so indefinitely.

CPF handles all basic firewall functions. It protects the system against hack attack, controls which programs get Internet access, and resists malware-style assaults that attempt to shut it down. To reduce the number of confirmation pop-ups, it automatically allows nearly a million known-safe programs.

Acting much like the ZoneAlarm OSFirewall feature, CPF proactive Defense+ protects critical system elements. The default Clean PC Mode treats programs already on the hard drive as trusted; all others get serious scrutiny. CPF properly blocked a dozen leak-test utilities, but legitimate software that exhibits similar behavior may also be blocked unless installed under a handy special mode that the firewall offers. Analyzing all of a program’s behaviors would help prevent such false positives, but CPF’s single-action behavior monitoring is a fine implementation.

Super-techie users can configure almost every aspect of the program’s behavior, but the average user doesn’t need to touch these advanced configuration options. Its versatility and tough protection make Comodo Firewall Pro 3.0 in best choice for free personal firewalls.

Via Source: CPF

The premise is fairly straightforward: Uniblue ProcessScanner scans your computer and lists all the various processes that are running. The software is a free download from www.processlibrary.com and installs with just a few clicks through a simple setup wizard. When you launched the program, it will automatically ask you if I wanted to scan for processes. The scan itself took less than 30 seconds.

The ProcessScanner will inform you the file name, whether the process was a security threat, and what program it was associated with. When you clicked a file name, you will be greeted by a detailed set of results for that particular file, including a description of what exactly the file was and what you might do with it. It also gave details such as the file path, how large the file size was, and how much memory it was using.

The user interface, which opens in a browser window, is clean and intuitively easy to navigate. You can quickly sort through the scan results by simply clicking one of four tabs: Security, Network, Performance, or Autostart.

ProcessScanner will give suggestion such as “Scan For Errors” for each line item. However, when you click the link, you’re redirected to a page on Uniblue’s Web site where you can download more software. The above process repeated itself with yet another piece of “free” software from the Uniblue Web site.

Still, ProcessScanner worked fast and gave you all the information you need on all your PC’s processes. The software sometimes will detect a Trojan horse, which enable you to eliminate easily.

Most backup programs are fairly similar: You set up a backup routine by designating the files to be backed up, a destination for the backup, and a time to automatically run the backup job. NTI Shadow lets you do these sorts of “conventional” backups, too, but it has some unique and innovative backup methods that are probably more like what most people want in a backup: complete “set-it-and-forget-it” file mirroring. Though not completely got free, the NTI Shadow 3 to work smoothly and at a bargain price.

NTIS3’s backup scheme is more like file mirroring: Backups are really just whole copies of files. This doesn’t save space on your backup device since there’s no compression, but it does make it easy to recover files during an emergency because you don’t need to install a restore program to get your files. Classic backup scheduling is available, but STIS3 can back up files as soon as they’re updated in real time, assuming your destination device is available. Installed a second internal hard drive and set up NTIS3 to back up and automatically watch a folder with more than 18,000 data files, which mostly MP3s, JPEGs, and Office files, totaling about 4.2GB, and it copied the files in under seven minutes. As more files added and altered files in the watched folders, NTIS3 backed them up in the background, usually within a few seconds after the task finished with the files, taking between 15 and 30% of the system CPU cycles, which still let you work on other things. It isn’t intended to back up a Windows installation and all of its open files.

If the destination drive is removable, such as a thumb drive or USB external hard drive, NTIS3 keeps track of it and performs the backup automatically when the drive is inserted, allowing for using specific thumb drives to automatically back up specific file types from a source folder, which is a neat trick.

Such backups require NTIS3 to run automatically at the Windows startup, but it failed to do so on one test machine, so double-check your backups before relying on it. That bugaboo aside, we consider NTIS3 to be among the easier and more straightforward backup programs available.