Titanium Internet Security 2011
Price: £40 (one PC)
Info: http://uk.trendmicro.com

Trend Micro's offering was by far the worst at picking up viruses in this year's test, failing to fix a dismal 23 per cent of the viruses planted on our test PC compared to most of the others' 100 per cent scores and Webroot's only slightly shaky 97.1.

In its favour, it didn't throw up any false positives, but nor did any of the other tools. We might just have caught it on a bad day, but we can't say it was a great start for this package. It's a cloud-based virus scanner however, so new emerging threats should be protected against very quickly.

In terms of raw performance, there's little to praise except for the fact that boot-up time after installing Trend was almost identical to before it, with a variance of just six seconds – the only other package even close to that was Microsoft itself, at 10 seconds.

In scanning, it used fewer resources than most, but not dramatically so. It took over 10 minutes to complete its secondary scan, where most – although not all – of its competitors ripped right through our test rig. Still, it wasn't the slowest performer by any means, beating both VIPRE and Microsoft by a good couple of minutes.

As far as extra features go, you get the standard firewall, a client-side spam blocker, plus some very handy extras: built in parental controls that both block kids from naughty sites and serve up reports, and a Data Theft Prevention tool that takes in your most important passwords and personal details and watches out for them slipping into the wrong hands.

All good stuff, let down by its initial performance. Hopefully next year it'll be better prepared.

Rating: 2/5