Sophos home is an excellent suite of antivirus and online security measures that makes itself even more appealing by the sheer generosity of its free version. Scans can be scheduled, or launched from the app if you suspect something is awry, and you also get tools to remove infestations from your system – though the more powerful ones are locked away behind the subscription. It also compares web traffic against a blocklist maintained by Sophos in order to enforce parental controls. While running in the background, Sophos checks for virus-like activity from running programs, and checks downloaded files for problems too.

Read more: 10 best wireless printers to make your home office admin easier When scanning, we found it used up to 25 per cent of the CPU time on our test PC, and hundreds of megabytes of RAM, but certainly no more than would be expected from a running program. While inactive, it does very little to slow your PC down, taking up around 8MB of RAM and barely troubling the CPU.

Once the app has been installed on your PC and linked to your account via an email address and password, you may never know it’s there unless it wants your attention.

Sophos free antivirus for mac review