Trend Micro's Internet Security Pro 2009, launched in October, can be used on up to three desktop systems to protect against a variety of malware and security threats.

The original basis of the package was the old PC-cillin anti-virus scanner but, as with all desktop security packages, extra features have been added as the threat landscape has changed.

Support is limited to desktop Windows systems, 32/64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate, Vista Business, Home Premium and Home Basic (all with Service Pack 1), Windows XP (32-bit) Home/Professional Edition (with Service Pack 2) and Windows XP Media Center/Tablet PC 2005 Editions (with Service Pack 2).

The main security features in the package are anti-virus and anti-spyware functions, personal firewall, spam email filter, parental controls, data theft prevention, and phishing/pharming protection.

The Pro version also has an activity dashboard giving a summary of the security threats found, and access to the logs created when Pro 2009 has performed a scan. There's also a password-protected vault for storing confidential documents in case the computer is lost or stolen.

Another extra feature is a system tuner which checks hard disks for recoverable space, finds unused entries in the system registry, checks programs that load up automatically when the system starts, and lists tracking cookies and web site addresses found in the browser.

The other two extra features are the ability to protect selected mobile phones by installing an agent on the handset, and a toolbar which can be installed on your browser that rates web site safety and can be used to check the reputation of any available wireless networks, perform keystroke encryption and rate instant messaging and webmail security risks.

We installed the package on three systems, the first being a Sony Vaio VGN-BZ11MN notebook which had an Intel Core 2 Duo P4800 2.26GHz processor with 2Gb of 800MHz system memory running under Vista Business.

A full system scan on this system took 66 minutes and checked 223497 'targets', although users should flush the internet cache, defrag the hard drive and remove any temporary files before running anti-virus scans. Checking a separate Windows 7 partition gave a time of 15 minutes to check 99,500 targets.

Installation on all three systems took around 10 minutes, after which we updated the package with the latest threat signatures and ran full scans on all systems. On the Sony notebook, Pro 2009 picked up the fact that we hadn't applied patches to the Office Professional 2007 suite we had installed, but nothing else apart from several cookies.

Although support is limited to desktop Windows systems, users can check system drives on shut down server operating systems by sharing the root system drive and pointing the scan at that drive.