The Trend Micro user interface is simple and informative, providing at-a-glance information and access to additional features. These include a remote file lock (a folder that can be locked shut via a Web interface should your notebook be stolen), as well as transaction guard (complete with a clever ‘secret’ keyboard) and smartphone anti-virus and anti-spam.

Unfortunately, we found this to be a ‘noisy’ suite, despite the firewall drawing upon a million-application Web-based data-base to configure access and significantly reducing pop-ups as a result. It’s mainly thanks to the real-time, suspicious behaviour monitoring, which has a hair trigger and bombards you with warnings because it’s unfamiliar with this or that utility. The danger is that users will learn to ignore these warnings and so miss the really dangerous ones. The firewall itself is efficient, albeit not as solid as Panda’s (see below). We couldn’t disable it from the Registry, and it disabled network and Internet access if killed via Task Manager, although attacking the firewall service directly did leave our system exposed.

We don’t care for the separate virus and spyware scanning, and Trend Micro took longer than either AVG or Panda in this regard, making it among the slowest scanning suites we’ve come across. Even though an IM scanner is included, it works only for MSN Messenger, which is also rather disappointing. Spam is much better, with a 0.1 percent false-positive rate and only 2 percent of our initial spam load passing the filter by. We liked the granularity of spam category configuration, where you can set the sensitivity towards adult, financial, health and four other categories. This version’s anti-spyware performance has also improved greatly, courtesy of the acquisition of InterMute last year, with the highly regarded SpySubtract and CWShredder technologies now built in.

A website filter flags potentially dangerous sites and, on our clean system testing, no malware made it through. Our heavily infected system test was less successful, but even so the performance wasn’t far short of standalone offerings. There are warnings when you try to access a known phishing or malware site, and data-theft protection using the typical private information store works with email, Web forms and IM, with exception lists included. Parental control was poor, though, with no per-user settings.

This is also a resource-hungry suite, con-suming more CPU cycles than either AVG or Panda, and requiring 250MB of hard disk space to operate, although the 128MB memory requirement is average. Trend Micro presents an odd mix of tight and lax security, with the relative ease with which the firewall can be disabled a case in point. You get a lot for your money, but F-Secure only costs $8 more and, ultimately, does a better job of protecting you and your PC.