Trend Micro PC-cillin 2007

When Trend Micro submitted PC-cillin for this month's Labs, it expressed concern that we wouldn't see the software's true potential. Apparently, PC-cillin tries to take the originating website into account when scanning downloads as malevolent or innocuous - a luxury our isolated testing environment doesn't permit.

Yet, despite the artificial environment, the software successfully identified 78% of malware overall and achieved a 97% detection rate among non-executables. It did, however, miss a few specific exploits that nearly every other package detected, including variants of the SDBot backdoor and the VB worm.

As PC-cillin is a complete security suite, we disabled features such as parental controls and wireless monitoring that were extraneous to our tests. This was easy thanks to a clear and responsive user interface, although we encountered one hiccup with the XP version, which initially demanded a password even though we hadn't set one. Installing on Vista required a simple, single download from the Trend Micro website.

In our security suite round-up back in January, we found PC-cillin to be relatively resource-hungry, and this month's tests backed that up: CPU usage stuck at 100% when downloading, and XP's total RAM usage for the system approached 900MB, while other packages such as AVG kept it nearer to 600MB.

£26 isn't bad for a full security suite for three PCs. However, the hair-trigger firewall will bombard you with warnings and alerts - an issue tangential to this month's Labs, but worth bearing in mind if you decide to buy.

Author: Arien Graham-Smith