Trend Micro Titanium Security for netbooks

Netbooks might be small, portable and cheap, but they are also relatively low on computing power.

And when it comes to installing and running security software, performance can take quite a hit.

Trend Micro Titanium Security for Netbooks is, as the name suggests, a security package designed specifically for netbooks that aims to have as little impact on performance as possible.

The interface is simple with just three buttons on the main screen: Reports, Settings and Scan Now. Trend Micro makes much of the fact that there’s no Update button. Instead, Titanium continually checks Trend Micro’s servers over the internet for information on the latest viruses as opposed to having to download regular updates to your computer.

The Reports section provides a graphical guide showing how your PC is being protected. Along with a Threat History timeline, there’s also a pie chart detailing the mix of viruses, spyware and other threats that have been detected.

As with most anti-virus programs, you can opt for a full scan or a quick scan. The former will check all files, while the latter speeds things up by concentrating on the locations that are most likely to be infected.

Disappointingly, there’s no facility to scan individual files on request, nor is there an option to run scheduled scans.

Titanium certainly didn’t take up much memory when running in the background. On our test computer it used less than 14MB, which means it is indeed well-suited to netbooks with a relatively small amount of memory and not much processing power.

It’s worth bearing in mind that although Titanium won’t hog your computer’s resources, it is missing some features that are commonly seen in modern security software. For example, there’s no email scanner or firewall included. Despite this, Titanium costs as much as more comprehensive packages such as AVG Anti-virus and Panda Antivirus for Netbooks.

If you want security software that has a minimal effect on performance, Titanium is up to scratch. However, in order to keep its footprint small the makers have ditched some features found in rival products, and with this in mind we would have expected it to be a bit cheaper.