2012 Antivirus Software Reviews

Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus + Antispyware 2012

As it turns out Trend Micro 2012 is considerably better than last year's version in most regards--particularly the most important one: the ability to detect viruses.

The 2012 edition proved itself worthy of the name "Titanium," besting the vast majority of the threats we threw at it, regardless of what category: virus, worm, trojan, keylogger, or spyware.

Manual scanning was equally good, with Trend Antivirus catching the majority of malware.

Regardless of what anyone's expectations are, there are still some areas where we don't like where Trend is right now: updates, tech support, and resource usage. Each of which has its own issues for Trend to solve.

There are very real improvements in their antivirus technology; it just needs to be better supported, use fewer resources, and put some of the control back into the hands of users.

What's the overall take? The 2012 Trend Antivirus, while improved, is still a bit of a mixed bag.
Trend Micro's real-time protection has improved quite a bit from last year's effort, we're pleased to report.

In our attempts to infect our testing computers, Trend Micro did better than expected with its realtime protection.

Over 93% of the viruses we tested with were easily blocked and for the most part, we found Trend Micro's manual scanning to be thorough and accurate.

The manual scan was fairly quick and easy, although it did somewhat regularly eat up 50% of our test systems' resources as it scanned.

The results we saw overall were better than many competitors with the majority of threats quickly detected even if its overall ability to remove viruses from infected system wasn't as good as when Trend's realtime protection was used to prevent an infection to begin with.
Resource usage has long been one of Trend Antivirus' struggles. This year brought welcome speed increases, but Trend Micro Antivirus still lags behind.

In a year where we saw strong improvement in usability thanks to improved resource utilization, Trend made progress, but not enough relative to their competitors.

During real-time usage we saw CPU usage was average, hanging around 1-2% with spikes around 20%. Given the high utilization we saw with some competitors, this was actually one of the biggest areas of improvement in Trend.

During our manual, full-system scans CPU usage ran higher than most competitors at 46-71% with numerous sustained peaks at 100%.

The good news: we saw better performance, including fewer, smaller peaks on many of our test PCs.
The user interface falls into the "love-it-or-hate-it" category.

In its favor, it's a very spartan interface with almost nothing in it. With no knobs for updates, email protection, IM protection, or antispam--among others--plus very few controls for much else, it's impossible to get lost in the software.

Further, with its small size, the interface works very well on netbooks with their small screen size, making it a top contender in the netbook category just because of its small size.

Working against it are these very same forces. It's tiny, and it can't be resized to fill the screen.

After using it on our test PCs--and almost as many hours debating about it--we decided the interface wasn't one of Trend's stronger points and scored it accordingly.
Many antivirus companies have only average, poor, or even non-existant customer technical support. Trend Micro's customer and tech support is actually fairly good.

Our experience was: it wasn't bad, it wasn't great. It was decent. (Sadly, "decent" with many things, especially software is the new "great")

While they do offer free phone support, it's only for basic issues. For anything more serious, they offer premium (i.e. paid) service packages which range from $24.95 to $79.95.
Trend Micro is following the latest trend (no pun intended) in antivirus updates: they've taken away all control for updates.

Our belief is that more control is always better, including how and when virus definition updates happen is always better. With this software, there's zero control.

And, there are no settings, no options, no buttons, nothing. We'd like some reassurance that our updates have been downloaded, applied, or at least are current. Unfortunately, you won't see that either in Trend.

For that reason, we can't give Trend Micro Antivirus high marks in this department.
Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus 2012 did well this year. While far from perfect, our testing showed Trend Micro was able to adequately deter the majority of virus, spyware, and adware threats.

Its real-time antivirus protection did well, as did its manual scanning. Next was the spyware detection and removal. It's decent but not great.

Were we rating the software on antivirus and antispyware alone, it would have placed very high in our comparison. As it turns out though, there's more to software than what's behind the scenes.

And, lest it go unsaid, the installer is quite good, too. It's fast and requires no reboot. Unfortunately, it doesn't tell you when the latest definitions are updated or give you the ability to update manually, leaving you to guess if you're protected or not.

We were glad to see improvement in their customer service, but it loses points because it's not free.

Overall, for basic antivirus protection, Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus 2012 is a decent choice, especially if one of your main concerns is software that's easy to use.