Bullguard isn't all bark and no bytes

BULLGUARD has recently released its latest security suite Bullguard Internet Security Version 7.

According to Bullguard's marketing director, Paul Leaman, this new version includes a completely revamped firewall and spam filter, as well an antivirus, online backup and a new anti-spyware feature. But lets see if it lives up to the spin.

The installation did take a pretty long time, with most of the time taken up installing the C++ redistribution component, but once it's installed a quick reboot and everything is up and running.

There are a few initial setup options, such as configuring the spam detection settings for your email program, running some initial scans and setting up which programs are allowed through the firewall, but once this is all set up it sits, hovering sentinel-like, in the background.

The menus are fairly intuitive, with the main menu providing a breakdown of the status of each of the sections and if any action is recommended by you. The only vaguely taxing part is getting used to the grid style layout whereby you have tabs along the side and tabs along the top, but even the most PC-illiterate amongst us should be able to get to grips with it quite quickly.

The sheer versatility of the package impresses me the most, meaning that for the majority of end users can buy a single product and have all of their bases covered. Most security experts will tell you that it's better to have more than one program covering each aspect of security, but given that your great-aunt Mildred may well pass out at the thought of trying to manage these, I think this makes for a good compromise.

One of the most interesting parts of this package was the backup feature. It fills a hole left by most security packages, namely what do it if it goes pear shaped and you lose your data, whether to attack or to hardware failure.

The backup function was a pleasure to use. You can use it to back your important data to either another drive on your network, or to an online drive provided by Bullguard. It can even back up your emails, which is usually a complicated affair of importing and exporting files. The version 7 package provides you with 1GB of space on the Bullguard servers but you can opt to by more, in 100MB blocks, if you need it.

For all its coverage and ease of use, one worry does remain in the back of my mind, putting all my eggs in one basket. By creating a single application like this, you create a single point of attack for those with nefarious intentions. I think the scale of the problem is tiny, but if you have the time you should make sure you run occasional scans with a different product to make sure.

I did have a problem after installing version 7 on one of my computers, whereby the whole program would crash if I tried to run a full anti-virus scan. But I found the product support to be excellent, there are FAQs and forums to browse and if those fail you can contact a support person at any time of day via email or live chat. With the help of the support person we soon tracked down the problem to a corrupted backup file and I was back to running fine.

CONCLUSION
If you're looking for a fire-and-forget program to cover your basic security needs then I would definitely recommend Bullguard. It's simple to use, it was effective at keeping my machine safe from all the attacks I could throw at it and the support is impressive.

You can download the program directly from the Bullguard site and trial it for free for 60 days. At a price of £34.99 for three licences you do seem to get a lot for your money. ?

L'INQ
Bullguard