Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2011 review

Trend Micro has taken the radical step of giving its anti-virus and security products names that actually distinguish them from every other product on the market. Thus, its 2011 range for home users is called Titanium. Internet Security sits in the middle of the Titanium range, between the Antivirus Plus and Maximum Security packages.

Titanium Internet Security has a great range of features, which are all easily accessible from its clear, well-designed interface. The main screen shows you its protection status, gives you a summary of its recent defensive activity and has a handful of large buttons that let you scan you PC, configure the program's settings and view detailed logs.

Naturally, you get the obligatory anti-virus and anti-spam components, as well as a browser defence plugin that works with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome. Along with these, you'll find two extra options in the Tools window: Parental Controls and Data Theft Prevention. Rather than having its own firewall, Trend integrates the Windows Firewall into its defences. As firewalls are actually fairly simplistic bits of software, just blocking or allowing traffic based on rules, it's arguably the controlling policy that's the important part rather than the firewall itself. This can be seen in the results for this software, where it was way ahead of the competition.

The parental controls make it easy to limit how long younger computer users spend online and monitor their activities. Pre-set options make it easy to configure age-appropriate browsing profiles. The Data Theft Prevention tool is more simplistic that some we've seen – you just enter the information you want to protect, and Trend prevents it from being sent over the internet to any unauthorised location – unfortunately, this means that if you want to use a protected credit card online, you'll have to individually add an exception rule for every e-commerce site you use.

Titanium's extra features aren't as sophisticated as those of equivalent products from Symantec or Kaspersky, but we can't fault its core functionality. Trend got the maximum accuracy score in our tests, protecting us against all 31 malicious sites and allowing us to download and install all of our benign software unimpeded. Moreover, Trend's defence was perfect – no malicious program actually got far enough to start installing itself on our PC, as they were all stopped as soon as we visited the infectious site.

Titanium Internet Security 2011 is also one of the cheapest internet security suites we've seen. If you need loads of extra features, Norton and Kaspersky both come with a range of extra tools, but nothing we've seen this year can beat Trend for protection. It's our Best Buy.