Unistal Protegent 360

Besides addressing multiple security needs, affordability is one thing that would attract your attention about this product. Protegen is a French word that means 'to protect' and additionally the 360 in the name suggests this product focuses on protecting multiple areas. In fact this package contains four modules to accomplish total protection: Total Security, Activity Monitoring, Port Locker, and Locate Laptop.

Total Security module of this package is to counter Internet threats. It is basically an antivirus and antispyware software with lots of features that stand out when compared with other such programs from different vendors. These include Social Network protection - which maintains and monitors your privacy settings against the links you received on your social networking account (like Facebook and Twitter, etc). Gaming and Laptop mode is another useful feature. While former frees up resources for game, the latter later does same for saving battery life. Finally we also found usage of virtualized browser quite beneficial especially when you know that places you are going to browse cannot be trusted.

Activity Monitoring is the module which, as the name suggests keeps track of activities performed on the machine and a regular report is sent via e-mail to a pre-defined destination. Using this package one can put Internet sites and applications in two categories or lists- Black and White; while white listed objects are not monitored, an alert is generated on usage of blacklisted object. This module is capable of capturing and sending screenshots on defined triggers to prove misuse of resources and finally chat clients can also be monitored using this module.

Port Locker prevents vital & important data to be transferred from one machine to another using Flash drive, DVD/CD writers, PCMCIA ports, Ethernet ports, Printer ports, Infrared ports and Bluetooth ports. It also provides options to lock/unlock single or multiple ports with authorized password. There are different lock type options as permanent, specific time duration (scheduled block) and when the computer remains idle or untouched. Alert is displayed as soon as an unauthorized action is performed against the locked ports. Users can white list one or more pen drives to be allowed on the system.

Locate Laptop is something like BlackBerry protect that provides location of your laptop in case you have misplaced it. This module contains a smart agent, designed to collect and transmit critical data needed to pinpoint laptops location. Additionally this module also enables one to remotely encrypt defined folders remotely. One can also set encryption to take place if the laptop does not connect to Internet for a particular interval.

We installed complete package on Windows 7 Home Basic machine with 2 GB RAM (minimum requirement of this package is 1 GB) to check for any performance degradation but in our setup there was no drastic slowdown of machine. Installation too is easy to perform. Most important point to remember while installing this package is to note down password you are asked for during installation process. If you forget this password you won't be able to uninstall this package. Navigation through various options is quite simple and you get daily reports on e-mail you have submitted while installation.

Bottomline:Rather than going for different solutions, you can consider this low cost package for both your home and office machine.