-2011 was a banner year for F-Secure earning the product of the year award from one highly respected testing agency.
The update to 2012 doesn't include the sweeping range of changes that 2011 did, but it does maintain many of the suits, high performance marks on both system impact and security.
I'm Seth Rosenblatt for CNET, and today, we're taking a first look at F-Secure internet security 2012.
F-Secure has got a wanky double installation process
where you run the installer, then reboot, and add your license key after which it completes downloading the suites components.
Once installed, you will find it launches with a new launch pad.
It looks like a Windows desktop widget, but its not.
It's actually the only place in the interface pretty much you can switch between computer security and online safety.
The third tab called F-Secure takes you the publisher's website where the drop down provides links to support, notifications, settings, and updates.
The launchpad isn't a bad tool, but it is a bit odd given that you have to go back to it to get to some parts of the program it's contained a in separate in a separate interface.
That complaint aside, the interface is very fast to navigate through and the big icons in clear language used all to appeal to beginners and experts alike.
Tools in the main interface window provide quick access to the most commonly used features like scanning.
There is no quick scan here, although you can choose run one
at several scans or a full computer scan.
The virus and spywares scan took a shade under 3 minute.
That's pretty quick.
While you can set it to perform actions automatically, there's no silent mode for gaming or watching movies.
F-Secure excels at it each security engine mode.
The newest version has overhauled its deep guard real time protection network and added an intelligent execution component for responding to threats even faster than before.
Practically across the board, last year's F-Secure 2011 was one of the most effective suites reviewed and early members provided by an independent third party testing agency indicate that F-Secure 2012 is once again one of the toughest suites on the block.
F-Secure isn't known for having a robust set of high end features instead chosen to focus on the basics plus firewall and parental controls.
Along with the absent gaming mode, F-Secure lacks basic support for Google Chrome.
If you're looking for a suite with online
Storage and backup or identify protection tools, you getter looks elsewhere.
However, there is no doubt that it offers a 1-2 combo of small system performance impact and stringent security and on those counts, this is one of the best suites we've seen this year.
For CNET, I'm Seth Rosenblatt.
