VIPRE Antivirus Premium
Price: £50 (unlimited PCs)
Info: www.vipre.com

VIPRE offers a few interesting features, one of which is its 'lifetime' subscription option. Unfortunately this costs £60, and isn't a great deal considering the all-home licence you get in the regular edition. Also, the 'lifetime' is that of your PC, not yourself.

Since you're going to upgrade and almost certainly have more than one machine around, in most cases you're going to be better off with the regular yearly subscription, spread out between your computers.

In tests, it proved to be a mid-range performer. It was one of the worst tools for slowing down boot-times, although not quite the slowest, and one of the slowest at actually scanning the drive after its first look around. Its CPU utilisation is reasonable though, and while there's no dedicated gaming mode, it never got in the way of actually playing games.

It may take time to do its job, but you probably won't be inconvenienced while it does it in the background. Its performance against our test system was a clean sweep, catching all of the viruses put in front of it, and not falling for any of the false positives hiding among them.

In testing, no major problems reared their heads at all, save that it can be very chatty – always keeping you in the loop, whether you have a reason to care or not.

VIPRE Antivirus is available in two versions – Premium and regular. The main differences are that only the Premium edition features a firewall and intrusion prevention, with a few other features thrown in – notably ad blocking, web filtering. The antivirus component itself appear to be the same decent performer.

Rating: 3/5