AVG has made a bit of a name for itself by becoming one of the most popular free virus checkers on the internet.

For those who don’t need additional levels of protection, it’s often perfectly adequate, but to really make sure your PC is secured you’ll need something a bit more capable such as the paid-for AVG Internet Security 8.0.

This software offers a far wider array of tools such as a firewall, email scanner and internet protection, which includes the AVG Toolbar, designed to offer protection against malicious web pages.

Setup is quite straightforward, during which we were able to retrieve the latest updates from AVG's website (an easy process), configure a scan schedule and run a firewall configuration wizard (you need to complete the wizard before the firewall can be enabled).

It’s a fairly painless process, after which the user is taken to the main interface where individual access can be found for each of the tools contained in the program. When one is selected the program displays a screen that in some parts of the program allows the user to change its behaviour, but in others simply reports the current status.

In the latter cases (the firewall, anti-virus, anti-spam and anti-spyware components) you’ll need to open an advanced menu through the toolbar to get any degree of control. This isn’t a particularly friendly approach, and while the firewall in particular does offer a swathe of configuration options, it’s rather painstaking to browse through waves of drop-down menus in order to make changes.

Most of the rest of the tools are quite well automated, and there’s a decent amount of information available here on the state of your system and any running applications or processes.

The Linkscanner tool, which is tied to the new AVG Toolbar, will automatically and directly scan websites you visit, or if you perform a search it will scan each result to make sure the site is safe before putting a green tick on the toolbar for peace of mind. This actually works pretty well, and doesn’t tie up resources or greatly affect the speed at which you can browse.

Full system scans also appeared to be quite efficient, and rarely tied up the computer to a point where we noticed an impact on performance. The software did manage to pick up all of the test files we placed on the system, although in some instances there’s not a lot of information available on what they are or how they might affect your computer.

Overall, AVG 8.0 performs well, being quite fast, well automated and comprehensive in the range of threats it covers. Unfortunately many other rivals also offer these advantages, and are far more elegantly presented in comparison to AVG’s rather verbose and confusing screens.