Even though there are plenty of available solutions, home computer security is far from being perfect. One of the main reasons is that, in the feature rush, many developers forget about the most important piece in the puzzle: the user. They design extremely complicated security solutions with lots of features which normal users don't understand and have no clue about how to use them. Our team has been on a mission to find those security solutions which are easy to learn and use for most (if not all) people. This is why we intend to find out who has not failed to remember who they are writing software for.
In this article I will be taking about the changes we made in our approach to this series, describe how we test each product and explain what each badge is supposed to mean.

What Is 7 Tutorials Doing?

Traditionally, reviewers have been focusing on the features and capabilities of security software. We want to do it differently!

We know that a correctly configured program will be able to cope with the security requirements of an average user. You probably don't need intelligent packet filters, tunneling features, logging features and fancy activity monitors. You probably just want to block suspicious programs and make sure your computer is safe from other types of attacks. This is what we are focusing on: How practical is a program in securing your computer? Not what its potential is, but how useful to someone who does not want to put much effort into using it or learning anything about it. We want to find the perfect security program for your grandmother or any other family member who thinks browser tabs are hard to cope with.

There is a logical reason behind this: most users are unlikely to need most of the advanced or "extra" features security programs have. Furthermore, most users are unlikely to invest too much of their time actively securing their systems and even when they do invest enough time, they do not like it. As a consequence, it is only fair to assume that most users require accessible software with robust basic features that are easy to configure.

What Are We Testing?

We are testing mostly commercial products that are distributed in the form of security suites. These products generally offer complete protection and we can evaluate the effectiveness of all the important protection modules: firewall, antivirus & antispyware. Running only an antivirus or just a firewall is no longer enough in today’s computing world. You need to have at least these three protection layers running on your computer.

How Are We Testing

In the last two years, our reviews have evolved a lot in terms of completeness and quality. Today we are structuring our reviews in five important test areas:

1. First Impressions - we first evaluate the supposedly simple exercise of downloading and installing the security product we are reviewing. We look at the number of steps required to download & install the product, the information required so that you are allowed to use the product, the size of the download and number of reboots required to finalize the installation. We are also interested if the security product updates itself shortly after the installation and how friendly the first interactions are.
2. Integration with Windows - one tendency of software developers is to ignore new features introduced in Windows operating systems. That’s why we still have security products which are not fully integrated with it, even after 2 years since Windows 7 was introduced. To make sure users have a good experience, we start by monitoring if a security suite automatically disables the Windows Firewall or Windows Defender. Having two firewalls running on your system can cause big headaches for users. Sometimes even Windows Defender can have conflicts with your other antispyware solution. Then, we evaluate if the security suite is integrated with User Account Control (UAC), so that you can install it and uninstall it correctly. We look at the impact on boot timings, how much memory is needed for the security suite to run and how well it integrates with networking features such as the Homegroup. We also check if the security suite has smooth scaling icons (256×256 pixels large) in the Start Menu. Even if they were introduced with Windows Vista, it is surprising how many products still ignore this nice design feature and have ugly looking icons. Last but not least, we test if you can kill the running processes of the security suite and how well it is integrated with modern Internet browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome.
3. Ease of Use & Configuration - we start our more advanced tests in this section. We first look at the options available for scanning your system for malware, the default scheduled scans and the available scheduling options. We try to evaluate how easy it is to find your way through all the menus and configuration options, without needing to access the help documentation. Then, we test to see how easy it is to get access to the support service, the help documentation and any reporting features available. We also try to evaluate how easy it is to understand the alerts and messages shared by the security product we are reviewing. Will people need a manual to understand what the product is saying, or is it using plain English to communicate with users?
4. Firewall - we mainly use two products to evaluate the performance of the firewall: Nmap and Nessus. We look for open ports, their relative importance to the security of your system and any other information that can be easily identified through a routine scan: MAC address, operating system, etc. We also check if the security suite is able to assign the correct security profile when connecting to a new network, so that you get the best balance between security and access to networking sharing features (when connecting to safe, private networks).
5. Antivirus and Antispyware Features - since we are not security experts, analyzing viruses and malware all-day long, we first look at what independent security organisations have to say about the effectiveness of the products we are rating. We also make some tests of our own, by asking the security suite to scan and disinfect an USB memory stick filled with malware. Then, we browse to a couple of malicious web-pages to see if the security suite is protecting the system while browsing the web. We also implant some malware in our system and ask the security product we are reviewing to make a full-system scan and evaluate how its speed in making the scan and its effectiveness at detecting and removing the malware.

We try to be as complete as possible and provide a good overview of the effectiveness of each product. While we don’t have a mathematical formula we use to give the final verdicts, we look at how well each product performs in all of these areas and share our recommendations.

Verdicts and What They Mean

There are three badges we use for sharing our product recommendations:

"Buy for Everyone!" was initially named "Buy for Grandma!". This is the "ultimate" badge we can give to a product. Its aim is to express the fact that the product is providing both effective protection and ease of use for people who are not necessarily skilled in using computers.

"Buy for Geeks!" can mean that a product can provide complete protection but it is not easy to use for normal people. There are products aimed mostly at professionals or users who are computer & security savvy. Sometimes (and we will highlight this where needed) a product can have some design issues or bugs that can make it difficult for normal users to get an optimal protection level. In such cases, the same badge will be given.

"Stay Away!" is the badge no product wants to receive. It means that the product fails to deliver effective protection to its users and we don’t recommend using it both to normal users and computer & security savvy people.

Conclusion

We hope that this series will remain useful to normal computer users, who don't want to end-up buying annoying security tools which they do not understand. We will do our best to find security solutions which shine from a usability perspective, the ones you can install even on your grandmother's computer.

Related articles:

The Best Internet Security Suites of 2011-2012
How Security Products Are Made - An Open Discussion with BitDefender