2013 Antivirus Software Reviews

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Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2013 Overall Score: 68%

Trend Micro Titanium offers the same virus protection as Trend Micro Antivirus plus extra security.

Trend Micro's basic antivirus software been significantly improved recently and offers great protection.

However, a critical fault of their "Internet Security Suite" is the omission a firewall. In our opinion, a firewall really should be standard for any ISS.

Thus, we cannot easily recommend this product when there are so many more effective and comprehensive ones in the marketplace.
Trend Micro now offers great malware and real-time virus protection. It blocked about 94% of the viruses, trojans, and rootkits we threw at it.

Manual scanning was also fast and accurate. Trend Micro detected, cleaned and deleted around 95% of our test threats.
During real-time protection testing, CPU consumption was average, around 1-2% with spikes up to 20%.

Memory usage was higher than average, but was ok during heavy usage.

During a manual scan CPU averaged 41%, though there were several peaks in resource usage, presenting a rather erratic usage pattern: 71% - 49% - 12% - 61% - 78% - 100% - 19%, etc.
Trend Micro's user interface is refreshingly simple.

The drawback, however, is that there are also few options for configuring the software and too many default settings.

For example, .zip file scanning is turned off by default and programs on portable drives aren't blocked from launching. And it's unclear how to adjust these settings.

Finally, it relies on the Window's firewall, though this is not made clear to the user, and it is not even able to enable it on its own and notify the user that it hasn't.
Trend Micro's technical support is average.

All help is initially free via phone and we found it easy to reach a live person quickly. If the problem cannot be solved by pointing you to existing FAQs, additional paid support is available, also by phone, but it will cost you. Prices range from $39.95 to $79.95 for virus removal.

We found their self-help resources on their website better than average and easy to find even if they don't offer full-service support for free.
Trend Micro's simplified user interface seems to have left out important information about antivirus updates. There is no way to know if or when updates were downloaded or any settings for manual configuration. We find this not only frustrating, but a significant hindrance towards ensuring the user that their PC is protected.
Trend Micro offers a few notable extra features.

Parental Controls allows blocking of categories or specific websites for set durations of time.

Frankly, we have found many other better, more sophisticated and comprehensive parental control programs out there than this one.

Secure Erase actually deletes a file rather than simply removing the directory information used to find it.

System Tuner optimizes disk space, startup programs and registry.

However, we were hard pressed to figure out what exactly was being done here. And, after finding several typos in the interface we lost most of our confidence in this feature.
We find Trend Micro's product good, overall, but know there are many other products out there that are better.

Notably, we need to see a firewall and much more control for the user. We'd like to see all technical support be offered for no charge.

Overall, there virus protection is solid, but the package still falls short.