PC-cillin is no longer just an anti-virus program - it is a full internet security suite that includes a personal firewall and spam filtering - and it costs between $20 and $40 less than the equivalent Norton product.


The major difference between PC-cillin IS and Norton AntiVirus is in their pedigree. Norton was originally designed as a consumer product that targeted home users and small businesses, while PC-cillin is a consumerised version of Trend Micro’s powerful enterprise product, and the difference shows in their respective interfaces.


PC-cillin’s interface is a little more complex and not quite as easy to use as the Norton product, however the differences are not major and the average home PC user should have little problem coming to grips with it.


The interface is intuitive and while the many features and settings may frighten the novice user, in most cases they won’t need to touch anything to be well protected.
Users’ main concern should be to ensure the personal firewall is enabled, both incoming and outgoing email is scanned and everything is updated, most of which is a done by default.


You need to register the program and manually update the first time and then set it to check for updates at regular intervals ranging from three to 12 hours. Once that is set it will automatically update itself.


While there is no provision for scanning instant messenger traffic, PC-cillin does scan web mail such as Hotmail, Yahoo! and AOL that’s accessed through a web browser.

PC-cillin’s biggest advantage is in its pricing. It does almost everything Norton Internet Security does at a better price.