Product Details

Get more online protection for less performance impact with this comprehensive security suite

AVG Internet Security 2012 is the latest version of the company's comprehensive security suite, now carefully redesigned to minimise its impact on your system.

The program still comes packed with all the functionality you'd expect, then. A strong antivirus engine protects you from dangers both on and offline; the LinkScanner keeps you safely away from dangerous websites; a configurable firewall blocks network attacks; and there's a rootkit detector, spam filter, identity theft protection, and more.

A simplified Internet Security 2012 console now also incorporates links to add-ons, including parental controls, online backup, and PC Analyzer. (Although the latter isn't too useful as it only checks for issues like broken Registry keys and leftover junk files; you can't fix these without installing AVG's PC Tuneup.)

Yet despite all the extras, AVG have managed to reengineer the suite to reduce its impact on your boot time, cut memory use by up to 20%, and reduce the suite's number of running processes from 16 to 11.

The size of the antivirus database on your drive has fallen by 40%.

And just in case that's not enough, AVG claims that a new internet optimisation technology included with the suite, AVG Accelerator, can for example cut download times for YouTube videos by as much as half. We've yet to verify that ourselves, but if it's even partly true then this is an extra feature well worth having.

Note that this version includes a 4-PC, 1-Year license.

Review by Mike Williams.