Review by Christopher Wanko

nI don’t mind the negative feedback. I know the application can crash your system, and leave you frustrated and vulnerable. As a public service, I’m keeping this review in place for the objective readers to use as one source of information.

Fans of the application should not measure their success against this warning. Your experience does not negate mine; I freely admit the program may work in your circumstances, but all potential buyers should see that PC-Cillin is far from perfect.nnBased on c|net’s review, I gave this a try, and could not get it to run without spawning a blue screen error (specifically the STOP 0x0000001D and 0x0000000A errors). This error was traced back to the firewall network driver of the package, and can only be fixed by uninstalling the software. For those of you with a technical background, the firewall is hooking into the kernel using an outdated technique (AtGuard used to use the same technique).

Technical notes: installed via web download and purchase (very easy to do, kudos to Trend Micro), onto a WinXP Pro machine (Dell Dimension 4500). Plenty of space, definitely enough RAM and a fast enough Pentium 4 CPU. System was recently patched to SP2.

When Trend Micro addresses that issue, I will be able to go over the feature set in more depth. At this point, however, I cannot recommend the product to anyone who needs a 100% reliable installation the first time. For that, I would recommend McAfee 9.0. While it might use more CPU cycles than most, it will install and not crash your PC.

If you need antiviral protection now and cannot afford to play around with software, skip this current release.

Fred