Review by Wilder K. Raven

I tried the competitors’ products, most notably the Norton products, and I wasn’t as impressed with them as I am with Trend Micro. While the competitors all work well, they’re also quite bloated and spend a lot of time taking over your system, installing toolbars without offering a path to deactivate them (I hate toolbars in my Internet browser), and asking too much in terms of violating privacy.

Trend Micro is different. It’s more streamlined, doesn’t hog resources while protecting your PC, and allows you the end-user control that major competitors don’t seem to think you should have. Trend Micro installs easily, and updates quietly in the background. It scans and repairs just as smoothly.

My only complaint about this package is that when you install it as a Pro upgrade to a registered, subscribed Trend Micro Antivirus package (the basic version of their paid products), it doesn’t take the months you have remaining on your current subscription into account. For example, I had six months left on my Trend Micro Antivirus subscription, and once I installed this Pro package, I had one year, instead of getting one year and six months. My six months are gone, replaced by the new year’s worth. I would like to have seen them find a way to give me everything I paid for in the lesser version, but then add the year on top of that instead of replacing it.

That issue aside, the package handles everything I need on Windows 7, even being smart enough to give me the choice of using Trend Micro firewall or Windows firewall, and disabling the one that’s not being used. In contrast, one of the competitors’ products actually asks you to turn off Windows firewall prior to running their installer. Trend Micro did it right; That made it easy, and they made it work WITH your operating system instead of working against it.

No complaints here. Top-notch product. Better than the free antivirus packages (way more features) and better than the bigger-name office standards which have grown into bloated, self-indulgent, non-intuitive packages. Trend Micro just gets it.