There's little point reiterating the proliferation of online threats in the modern online world, so instead let's look at the latest release of a popular remedy. GriSoft has, for many years, provided a free version of its popular anti-virus solution AVG, and it has done so again with the new 7.5 edition.

The free edition, as you'd expect, is a stripped-down version of the Professional version the company sells (and tries to upgrade you to), but the truth is it has enough functionality to serve the majority of home users.

Available, although not easy to find, from the main GriSoft site, once downloaded the software takes you through its simple installation. It also wants to check for the latest updates (and it's wise to comply), and once in place, part of the program's daily routine is to download a daily update. This is included in the free version too.

It then moves on to tackling a full system scan, which again it likes to do on a regular basis, and on our test systems (a Core 2-based laptop with a 120GB hard drive, and a Socket 939 Athlon 64 desktop with 80GB drive) the scan took between 25 and 45 minutes.

It does have quite a system overhead, especially on single core machines, and it's obvious when a scan is taking place. You can still word-process, browse and e-mail, but we struggled with anything much more demanding. The scan was accurate and correct in picking up problems, though, and we were content with the level of virus protection it offered over a month-long test.

Our only other niggle is that we would have preferred a summation screen that made it clear when problems had been discovered and when the system was clean. A screen is presented, but the information isn't as transparent as it could be.

On-demand virus scanning isn't the only tool in the program's armoury, though, with a Resident Shield that scans files and documents on-the-fly, and a competent e-mail scanner that works with popular mail clients to check your mail on the way into your machine. Again there's an overhead here, albeit a small one, as the program delays incoming post slightly while it runs its checks.

AVG Free 7.5 is happy to carry on doing its work without intervention, but there's a friendly Control Center application that glues the constituent parts together. From here you can manually initiate updates and scans, rearrange the program's schedules and disable parts of its work.

In all, it's a competent security program (albeit missing some further security elements that would be of use to the standard system), which naturally offers excellent value for money. We'd be perfectly happy recommending it for use on a home system, although for PCs where more sensitive work is being done, it's worth spending some money, especially given the modest price of the likes of F-Secure, or even the Professional Edition of AVG.

A perfectly sound entry-level security utility that offers more than you'd expect from its no-price status. More demanding users should still consider spending a bit of cash, though.