Trend micro antivirus review cnet

Configuration options occasionally pop up additional windows, but never more than one. We really like the configuration option that allows us to control the level of alerts--either it will show us all the possible alerts, or it groups them and only occasionally displays a message. We think that's great, since more advanced users might not want to be informed of everything, where casual users will appreciate the application's attention to detail. Features Trend Micro continues to streamline its scanning process, this year combining antivirus, antispyware, and antirootkit scans into one engine.

When the scans are complete, Trend Micro Antivirus plus Antispyware displays information about each threat. This is also true in the Changes scan, which can review changes that are made to your system registry or other key program files. By highlighting each change, the right-hand column provides additional details without having to access the Internet and go to the Trend Micro site.

Like Kaspersky and Norton, Trend Micro includes enhanced heuristics. What that means for you is that emerging threats are blocked proactively by a constantly updated rules set. In addition, Trend Micro is able to trace the source of various changes in your system registry, your Windows folder, and instead of producing dozens of alerts, simply presents one unified alert. One very cool feature is the ability to clean up various files, be it the cache of the browser, or the last-viewed files in Word.

This one-stop cleaning is an important security feature, especially if you share your computer with others. Another feature we like is the ability for Trend Micro to erase the log files and other security entrapments created by using AOL and Yahoo instant messengers. The theft prevention feature only works in SMTP e-mail and instant-message clients in the Pro version.

You can also select protocols that are allowed to send protected data, and which aren't. You can also insert customized data field to protect. The Web threats protection, which works to stop phishing and pharming, is heavily based on a firewall-style slider combined with whitelists and blacklists. Again, its efficacy is debatable, especially when a Web site's backend servers or ad server can be hacked without the site itself registering as risky. As with many of Trend Micro's competitors, the parental control section can be configured for Adult, Teen, or Child.

However, here you also have the option for "Mature Teen" and to customize a setting. The Adult user or system administrator can set access times based on user log-in, and customize the protected data field.

The Other Settings tab offers more information about the Trend Micro subscription; Automatic Updates and a definition file scheduler; toggling the Trend Micro Smart Protection Network, which controls the behavioral information your computer submits; security warning pop-up controls; password protection to keep Trend Micro from being used by others; and logs access.

Its interface scheme, with a simple-sentence drop-down explaining what a feature does as well as links to dig down for more settings, backfires here. Most of the options in this tab only contain one settings link, meaning that what should take one click takes two.

Frustratingly, the update scheduler can't be set to check for updates more often than once an hour. Features only included in the pro version of the suite are: protection for mobile phones, the Trend Micro toolbar that installs on Internet Explorer and Firefox, a system tuner for recovering disk space and defragmenting of hard drives, and a password-protected vault that seals if your computer is stolen and accessed.

The mobile protection is available only for Symbian- and Windows Mobile-based phones, and because of the variation of models, it requires configuring a download for your specific model. Mobile threats are growing, so being able to prevent browser-based attacks on your smartphone for the same cost of protecting your PC might appeal to some users.

Trend Micro has published a comparison chart so you can see which features made it into which products. Performance Although there were no problems navigating within Trend Micro, and there were no noticeable slowdowns to the naked eye, certain Trend Micro performance hang-ups did appear.

For one, the suite had a difficult time respecting the default Web browser setting on our Windows 7 laptop. Sometimes it would open internal program links in Firefox, our default browser, but more often, it would open them in Internet Explorer. These links, opening into either browser, took much longer to load.

It wasn't clear whether this lag was because of the main suite or the Trend Micro toolbar scanning the links before loading them. CNET Labs' benchmarks reveal that all three of Trend Micro's products had an uneven impact on computer performance. The Pro version also dramatically slowed down shutdown performance, by nearly 8 seconds, while the basic Antivirus dragged on the shutdown cycle by less than 1 second, and Internet Security added 1.

The benchmark of Trend Micro's full scan was quite slow, with the Internet Security Pro and Antivirus with Antispyware products taking 19 minutes, and the standard Internet Security taking 20 minutes. The nonbenchmarked quick scan compared favorably with industry standards, coming in at 53 seconds. The full scan took an average amount of time, at one hour and 28 minutes. Besides potential hardware conflicts, keep in mind that these differences can often be attributed to the generally clean state of the benchmarking computer's hard drive, versus the numbers programs and files that reside on a real-world machine.

Trend Micro Anti-Spyware 3 is easy to use and control. The main display window gives direct access to the key functions of scanning for spyware, cleaning your history tracks, restoring your system, and viewing log files of the program's activity. Along the top are tabs that offer quick views of your system status, statistics, and any blacklists or whitelists you have defined. The History Clean Up screen is especially nice and offers a finely grained and clear way to remove history tracks.

Trend Micro Anti-Spyware 3 packs a lot of useful features into its friendly and intuitive interface. In addition to the expected range of system spyware scans and monitoring, there is an excellent history-tracking cleaner, a simple cookie manager, a restore utility, and a secure file-delete function that will wipe your files in accordance with DOD standards. WhatsApp Messenger. Talking Tom Cat. Clash of Clans. Subway Surfers. TubeMate 3. Google Play. Navient student loan settlement.

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