Product Reviews

Sophos Anti-Virus rules the roost in the corporate sector (see issue 100, p192) and Symantec's Norton AntiVirus 2003 (see issue 98, p166) tops our A-List as far as the general market is concerned, so where does that leave Trend Micro PC-cillin 2003?

Well, the interface itself is a joy. It's friendly and intuitive with clear icons and tabs, so there's no difficulty or confusion whether you want to quickly perform a manual scan on a particular folder or schedule a timed system scan.

By default, PC-cillin checks for updates every three hours, but PC-cillin 2003's ground-breaking feature is Outbreak Alert. This lets you know when a confirmed virus outbreak has been identified and pops up red or yellow alerts containing

Also new is email scanning, which worked on both POP3 boxes and web-based services in our tests. Another nice touch is Wi-Fi protection, which protects your notebook when connected to a non-trusted WLAN.

PC-cillin falls down with its installation routine, though, which refused to co-operate on two machines that had ZoneAlarm Pro and Sophos Anti-Virus installed. Even with these applications switched off, and on one box ZoneAlarm uninstalled, PC-cillin failed to complete installation, complaining it was interrupted and cancelling the install in a huff.

I finally managed to get PC-cillin 2003 up and running on a clean XP Pro test machine. The new firewall feature is on by default, but WebTrap (which blocks dangerous Java/ActiveX applets) is oddly turned off. The somewhat pointless Site Filter is also off by default, and there are much better products out there, notably CyberPatrol or ZoneLabs ZoneAlarm Pro 3.5 with Web Filtering if you need web filtering or a firewall.

If you're a happy, established user of PC-cillin, the upgrade cost of £17 is worth the added functionality. However, we're hard-pushed to make a case for changing from Norton or Sophos, unless you know you'll benefit from PC-cillin's unique features.