All 13 of the security suites we reviewed offer at least antivirus, antispyware, and antispam components, plus a firewall. Some, such as Eset Smart Security 4 and PC Tools Internet Security 2011, had little more. The others provide additional capabilities--parental controls, gaming features (such as a "silent mode" that won't interrupt a game with alerts), and online backup (useful if malware ever nukes your PC).
A few products also boasted "sandbox" features that run a new app within a protected environment so that if it turns out to be malicious, it can't infect your operating system. In 2011, Avast, Comodo, and Kaspersky all offer this feature.
Many users worry that a security suite will slow their PC. This year, AV-Test ran a battery of tests to address that concern, looking at a number of key aspects of a suite's impact on PC performance--including boot time, application launch time, file copy operations, application installation time, and file compression, among others. AV-Test also looked at how quickly each suite scanned a PC for viruses and other malware.
(For the three suites that had the most and the least impact on system performance, as measured by memory usage, see the "RAM Hogs" chart at the end of this article.)