It’s been around since 1988, but German antivirus company Avira has finally said goodbye to the AntiVir brand.

And so its 2012 range will now follow the same naming convention as, well, just about everyone else: “AntiVir Personal” becomes “Free AntiVirus“; “AntiVir Premium” becomes “Antivirus Premium 2012” and “AntiVir Premium Security Suite” is now “Internet Security 2012“.

The latest releases don’t have any major new technologies to help them stand out from the crowd, either, unfortunately.  Still, Avira have been working hard, and there are plenty of smaller worthwhile improvements which should be welcome to Avira fans.

The new Express installation gets you up and running far more quickly, for instance. It also displays an alert if you’ve other antivirus tools which might cause conflicts, and offers you the chance to automatically uninstall these.

Once set up, you should find the programs load faster and use less RAM than before.  A redesigned interface means it’s quicker and easier to find your way around. There’s now built-in protection for your HOSTS file. And the antivirus scanner now makes better use of system priorities, so if you run a Low Priority scan then it should no longer have any noticeable performance impact on the rest of your PC.

Notable improvements to the commercial products include IPv6 support for the firewall, mail and web protection modules. The Game Mode functionality is now configurable. And if you have any problems with Avira’s Antivirus Premium 2012 or Internet Security 2012, then the new Live Support feature may be able to help: based on TeamViewer, this will allow an Avira tech support engineer to remotely access your system and manually fix any issues.

Put it all together and Avira Free AntiVirus offers good basic protection. Avira Antivirus Premium 2012 includes behaviour monitoring and Live Support, and is yours for $29.99, while Avira Internet Security 2012 ($49.99) adds everything else – firewall, spam filter, parental controls, backup and more.

Whether there’s enough new here to attract new customers is open to question, but if you’re already an Avira fan then the new range should appeal. Either way, the trial builds are now available: take a look for yourself.