It's not like the old days. In much the same way that front doors now need locks, cars now need alarms and the stereotypical university student needs shares in Durex, it's simply asking for trouble to have a PC online without protection.

An example: this scribe recently put a PC together and went online for the first time to download some firewall software. Within 45 seconds that brand new PC was infected. Scary.

So, accepting the modern day requirement for online protection, enter stage-left F-Secure Internet Security 2004. Like Norton's similarly-named product, F-Secure Internet Security 2004 offers virus protection, an Internet shield (which includes a firewall and e-mail scanning engine) and a rolling programme of updates. Another parallel is that it gives you a licence to use the software for twelve months before you're expected to shell out again for next year's version.

It's a lot less flashy than Norton's software though, and it goes about its work a little more anonymously. It's straightforward to get up and running and happily configures itself, allowing you to go in and adjust levels of security as you see fit.

That's an important point; while you can leave it to its work with no interference at all, you may be more comfortable managing, for instance, the way it scans e-mail file attachments (which does take a little longer than we were expecting) and the depth of protection you want it to provide. Likewise, deciding which applications on your PC are allowed Internet access is a task best shared.

Once installed, it sits for the most part in your system tray. Unlike the aforementioned Norton, the firewall aspect doesn't throw up message windows every time someone tries to attack your computer. That's not a bad thing, though, as in the first hour F-Secure Internet Security 2004 had picked up around eighty attempts on our testbed machine.

Digging further into the options, the program keeps a log if you want to get more details. Again, there's not much in the way of fancy presentation here - it's simply a case of providing you with information and letting you get on with it. Its firewall picked up everything we threw at it and didn't seem to eat up a chunk of our bandwidth in doing so.

The virus protection works in a similar, anonymous way. The software updates itself a couple of times a day and the box copy boasts that it could even detect unknown viruses. That latter point we couldn't put directly to the test, although we did find that F-Secure Internet Security 2004 happily picked up the more familiar viruses we did challenge it with.

The whole operation is wrapped up in a reasonably friendly interface, although chances are you won't be seeing a whole lot of that. Given that the program works quietly in the background - and will, if you let it, schedule full virus scans when your PC isn't being used - there's not much call to interfere once it's up and running.

Some may prefer the more obvious alerts that Norton pops up, although this reviewer was happier, once it was ascertained that Internet Security 2004 was working as it should, to let the software get on with it. That's ultimately just horses for courses, though.

As it stands, this is strong, efficient software that may not be quite as user-friendly as some of its competition, but does as good a job with a bit less fuss.

This is a software tool in pretty much every sense. It fixes the problem it says it will fix and doesn't go out of its way to be your best friend in the process. An efficient, effective and good value package.