Best home Internet security

We've exhaustively tested every major internet security suite. Here we present the top 5 available in the UK in 2015.

The Protection result, though, was a perfect 6.0/6.0, with all the recent and zero-day threats in the test selection being detected. This gave G-Data TotalProtection 2014 an overall score of 16.0/18.0, a very good result.

The price of Kaspersky PURE 3.0 Total Security makes it a competitive product for a full IS suite with all the trimmings and its AV-Test results put it in a very strong position. It's good to see anti-malware and backup apps combined in a wash-and-go product like this, though the interface would benefit from a more equable distribution of its function links.

AV-Test gave the Norton code 17.0/18.0, a very good result. Broken down, this gives 5.5/6.0 in both Protection and Usability and a full 6.0/6.0 in Performance, even if this wasn’t reflected in our own tests of PC slowdown.

Although the Performance score, which shows the resource hit, is a bit low, this wasn’t reflected in our own, admittedly simpler, test. The Protection result was pretty good on recent threats, though it dropped down to around 90 percent on zero-day attacks.

Technically one of the best IS suites you can buy, Bitdefender Total Security 2014 also offers a swathe of extras which all help to protect some aspects of your Windows life online. Even though it's so feature-rich, it manages to set itself up and run unobtrusively in the background. We'd have liked a bit more online storage, particularly since it's a 3-PC licence, and there are better Bitdefender choices if you want to protect devices running a variety of operating systems.