F-Secure has released a new Internet Security 2010 software featuring redesigned interface coupled with very easy to use parental control features that you can setup during your initial installation while F-Secure is downloading updates in the background, this new build is easy on system resources and F-Secure claims to have 60% faster virus scans than the previous version.

Our installation of the F-Secure Internet Security 2010 on a test PC having C2D E6320 and 2.5 GB RAM was finished in around 1 minute, after a restart and verification of the key, it showed the programs requesting Internet access like Steam client and others installed in our system, after clicking allow couple of times we were good to go , downloading updates and further installation took another 15 minutes on our 1 Mbps connection.

The parental control settings in the F-Secure 2010 Internet security are one of the easiest out there, so lets have a look at the parental controls

System Scanning- Virus, Spyware removal

The overall speed of the scanning was good, our almost full 160 HDD including lots of software, games, applications,  was scanned in 1 hours and 4 minutes, however there isn’t a pause scan option while scanning the hard drive so if you stop  the scan, you would have to run it again from scratch. Pause scan option is particularly good when you just want to Hibernate your PC after pausing the scan and then turn it on later to resume scan from where it left, very helpful these days as HDD capacities have grown manifolds and scanning takes time. It detected all the viruses we have in our virus-pendrive with ease and the Anti-Spyware was pretty hard on the advertising agencies, and detected their tracking cookies as Spyware.

Full System Scan in Action - no pause button

Other thoughts: After installation of F-Secure our Local Area Network stopped working, we weren’t able to access files of our test PC from other PCs on LAN, Even after configuring again with the Windows “Set up a home or small office network” it didn’t work, nor does it showed any warnings or asked for permission. I have to set this up manually by  going to Settings -> Firewall -> Firewall Settings -> Trusted Network Adaptor -> Select your Network Interface Card.

It was not able to detect our LAN IC on our Intel DG965RY motherboard, after selecting the network IC, local network access was restored. This might be a problem specific to our system.

Pros and Cons of F-Secure Internet Security 2010

Pros :

• Very Easy on System Resources
• Great Design and User Interface
• Provides superb protection, it was able to detect and clean 4 viruses on our test system, which up to date free Avira couldn’t.
• Easy to Set-Up
• Good and easy to use Parental Control Settings
• Browsing Protection
• Statistics: provides quick overview of security history
• Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and Anti-Spam protection in one package
• Compatible with Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP

Cons:

• While performing full system scan, System got noticeably slow and  CPU usage went to as high as 75%, 10% being average
• No Pause Scan  button
• Didn’t Detect LAN card automatically (this could be specific to our system)

 Download F-Secure Internet Security 2010 trial

RATING: 8.5/10