To paraphrase a politician whose career isn't having its finest moments right now, Kaspersky's Internet Security 2010 is a serious application for serious times. Professionally presented from the off, it's a suite of utilities for battling the many nasties that attempt to infiltrate your computer. As such, the product includes anti-virus, firewall, spam, phishing and banner ad protection, along with defences against denial of service attacks.

There's clearly a lot going on under the bonnet here, and the software is perhaps understandably insistent on you removing any other security software that may conflict with it as part of its installation. Once you've done that, the installation itself is quite a speedy job, and after the usual downloading of updates and activation of the product (and we hate that the latter has become a feature you'd describe as ‘usual', but we sense we're on the losing side of the battle there), you're presented with the main Kaspersky control screen.

This is a tidy and professional piece of work, with large tabs down the left-hand side of the screen giving you access to the more advance features: but otherwise, you'll be fine just leaving the program to get on with its work.

The main front screen, complete with a radar-esque bar at the bottom (who said security programs couldn't do a bit of eye candy?), gives you clear access to the main tools you're likely to need, and as usual you can manually choose to scan your machine, for instance, or simply schedule things in and carry on regardless.

Either way, Kaspersky is excellent at its job. With a modest system footprint, it ingratiates itself into your day to day working, adding things like a link filter to your web browser and e-mail scanning to your mail client. And while you can customise what parts of the suite you want to use, we found it best to leave it to its work. For the duration of our test, it kept our machine running at its usual speed and deflected the malware and tests we threw in its direction.

There are some new features and tweaks, too. A sandbox mode provides a ‘safe' environment to run certain applications (a nice idea, well executed, but is it any surprise that Internet Explorer is the only tool in there when you load up for the first time?), and there are accommodations for gamers, too. And performance continues to evolve, making for a satisfying package.

If there's a downside, it's that it nags you a little too often for our liking, and for less experienced users, we suspect that's not what they want to see: a security package that can completely fly under the radar is presumably the goal there. However, you can't argue with Kaspersky where it counts, and its product is strong, secure, well presented and a solid barrier against the worries of the web world.

Verdict
A top notch security suite which is pretty much install and forget, with a good, broad range of features. Its anti-virus capabilities shine particularly strongly, although the trade-off is longer scan times. Still, that's well worth the compromise in our view, and at £30 this package comes cheaper than we'd have expected.

Company: G Data

Contact: 08448 870000

Tags: antivirus kasperskylab internet security personal computer phishing security kaspersky mcafee