How secure is your computer? Finding out can take a little work. You might have to check your antivirus, firewall, backup program, maybe the Windows Action Center and various other system settings.
OPSWAT GEARS is a free utility which tries to do everything you need from a single interface. It works on individual PCs (Windows 7+) or Macs, and can also be used to check and manage security on up to 25 network computers (switching to the paid version removes that restriction).
You’ll need to enter your email address to download the program, but after that it’s all very straightforward. Installation is quick and easy, and GEARS begins scanning your system as soon as it’s launched.
The opening Home page summarises GEARS findings as they appear, and soon it was telling us our “protection score” was an alarming 58/ 100.
With a security score of 58/ 100, our test PC clearly needed some work
Clicking the “Security Score” tab showed this figure was built from individual scores for Firewall, Antivirus, Hard Disk Encryption, Backup and more. Selecting any of these gives a further breakdown, for example reporting we’d scored only 20/30 for Antivirus because we hadn’t run a full system scan recently.
