Product Reviews

Trend Micro's PC-cillin is a well-known name in the world of anti-virus software, but now the company has decided that anti-virus protection alone isn't enough to keep users secure in this age of always-on connections. As a result, it has married its anti-virus software to a personal firewall to create Internet Security. In fact, Trend Micro will no longer offer a standalone anti-virus product to consumers, so this product is the direct update to PC-cillin 2003.

Once you fire up the installer application, Internet Security scans only the most important areas of your system to check for viruses. You can tell that it isn't a very deep scan, as it takes less than a minute to complete. Compared to Norton it's a quick skim, but probably all that's necessary during an install.

Once the core install is complete, the software automatically checks for any updates to the virus definition files or program components. When this is finished, you'll find the program residing in your task bar. Double-click on its icon, and you'll be presented with the main program window.

Trend has devoted a lot of time to Internet Security's user interface, making it as friendly as possible. To a large extent it succeeds. Like pretty much all the consumer security packages currently on the market, Internet Security adopts an HTML approach to its configuration screens. There are four large buttons down the right-hand side, with the main display pane taking up the rest of the program window. The first button, Status, is always highlighted when you open the application and displays a window with additional buttons for the Internet Security, Antivirus and Logs modules. However, to find out the status of these functions you have to click through to each of their submenus.

This isn't as good a solution as that used in both Norton and McAfee, where the status of all the firewall and anti-virus modules can be checked at a glance from the main window. In fact, Norton and McAfee use a traffic-lights system to display when each module needs your attention. Internet Security, on the other hand, takes a much more passive

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approach, so you aren't always aware that the program needs updates until you get a warning alert when you start Windows.

When it comes to the firewall component, Trend Micro has taken a pragmatic approach and decided to automatically allow many common programs to access the Internet without firing a warning message at the user. It's a good decision, because training many of the firewalls from other suppliers can be a chore. The distraction of constant security alert pop-ups can be such an annoyance that many novice users are no doubt tempted to turn their firewall off, leaving themselves exposed.

The other plus is that you aren't paying a premium for the firewall features like you do in the security packages from both Norton and McAfee.

Naturally, being based on PC-cillin, the virus-busting engine in Internet Security is top notch. There's a real-time scanner, which checks files as you're downloading them, and email scanning is provided for both incoming and outgoing messages. We also like the way it peeps inside compressed files by default. Many other virus busters require you to enable this feature in an obscure submenu.

The software comes with a separate virus-scanning engine for Pocket PC, Palm and Epoch PDAs. While this may be effective, it's questionable how useful this really is when you consider how few viruses are found on these devices. Also, unlike the PDA scanning in VirusScan, which McAfee has now dropped, Trend Micro's solution involves actually loading a scanning application on the PDA rather than just having the host PC perform the scan during synchronisation. Naturally this takes up precious RAM on your PDA.

More useful is the Anti-Spyware feature that's built into the PC-scanning engine. Spyware and adware are having a much bigger effect on Internet users these days and cause slow browsing, unwanted pop-up adverts and other distractions. You can use dedicated programs to hunt down these parasites, but Internet Security tries to stop them from getting there in the first place by offering real-time protection.

The software also includes protection against unwanted spam. When a mail arrives that Internet Security thinks is unsolicited, the program flags it by inserting the word 'Spam' in the subject line. You can then use filtering tools in your mail program to decide where it's deposited.

On the whole, Trend Micro has come up with an attractive package for those who need the double whammy of anti-virus and firewall protection. The user interface could do with a few tweaks, so it's easier to tell when the program requires user attention, but other than that Internet Security 11 provides good overall protection at a great price.