Trend Micro has now completely ditched its PC-cillin brand, in favour of the more sober Internet Security label. The standard 2009 edition doesn’t bring any major new features, but keeps parity with other packages – you get the expected malware detection and firewall, plus browser protection, anti-spam, anti-phishing and parental controls. The Pro edition has a few unusual tricks too, with remote file-locking and smartphone antivirus.

Remote file-locking works with a simple encrypted folder, which can only be accessed with a password. If you report your computer stolen the folder is “locked” the next time the PC connects to the internet. The smartphone package works with a wide range of Symbian phones, but as there’s still little
smartphone malware in the wild, it’s impossible to say how effective this is.

More important than these extras is the package’s impact on your system and its efficacy in detecting infections. Unfortunately, in these crucial areas Trend Micro Internet Security lags behind. Installing it on a clean system that took 35 seconds to boot added 12 seconds – twice the impact of Norton or Kaspersky.

Memory usage was comparatively high: one minute after booting, our bare system reported 475MB in use by Vista, which rose to 571MB with Trend Micro installed.
There were disappointments on the detection front, too. Its overall detection rate of 85% is respectable, but falls short of Norton’s 92%. It’s also worth noting that, while Norton and Kaspersky dealt silently with every threat they found, Trend Micro stopped to ask us what to do ten times.

We’d like to be more positive about this package. But it’s expensive if you don’t have three computers to protect, and the brutal fact is that both Norton and Kaspersky offer better protection with lower system overheads.