Trend Micro Antivirus Plus Security

Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security: Set up and installation

The Trend Micro Antivirus plus Security web page, unfortunately, hides the link to a trial, and instead highlights their '30-day money-back guarantee.' While they may be hoping that users will simply purchase their license right away, so be aware. Look for the ‘Free Tools’ link at the top of the page, to go to the Free Trials area.

The trial available covers the full-featured Trend Micro Maximum Security suite, but realize that the interface is quite alike to the product on the lower tier, and will give a really good idea on Antivirus+ Security’s performance. Also, this trial goes for a full 30 days, which is plenty of time to see if this solution meets your needs.

Installation is a snap, including an easy download, and then automatic setup. As the installation concludes, a prompt appears for providing your email address for product news and updates, but we appreciate that this step is entirely optional, as our box remained blank and the installer finished without an issue.

With the setup concluded, the package went into the background, although it did add an icon to the PC’s system tray. This antivirus solution does a good job of blending into the woodwork, and you can forget that it is even doing its job.

We started off doing some initial exploring, and with the default settings, it did not live up to expectations. Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security incorporates a spam filter, but it did not come on by default after installation, and frustratingly the interface hardly brings any attention to it. We only realized this after searching through Outlook’s interface, searching for a toolbar, which we did not find, and then the answer appears in the Settings dialog.

However we can put these minor issues to the side, as Trend Micro remains easy to install, with a robust core antivirus engine, and a full 30-day trial providing plenty of time to decide if it suits your needs prior to purchase.

Trend Micro Antivirus+ Security: Features

The interface has a simple, appealing appearance, that includes icons that are animated, the prominent scan button, and your security status clearly described, along with text captions and a gaggle of tooltips. We also like the option of customizing the console via the selection of a new background image.

The Settings dialog also carries through this same simplicity these. Leaving out the often confusing technical jargon, options appear in good ol’ plain English, including "Prevent programs on portable drives from launching automatically" or "Check if programs try to make unauthorized changes to system settings which could threaten your security."

Experts may be looking for more granular control, but for those that don’t often go into the settings of their antivirus program, Trend Micro's autopilot approach gets the job done.

Scanning options follow the simple theme to be quite straightforward, with the options for performing a quick, full or custom scan, with being able to designate particular drives or folders to scan. There's no additional control over this process, for example, lacking Avast’s capability to add other scan types or to regulate the details of how it performs. However, it gets high scores for ease of use, and for those that skip over the settings of your antivirus program (no judgment, but we know many users are in this camp), we suspect you’ll be ok with this.

Too bad that the scan times measured a little below average during the testing process, but any program can pretend to scan at breakneck speed without finding anything. Antivirus+ Security does a thorough job, actively identifying threats and suspected files. Unfortunately, the penalty of this is that it also falsely alarmed at several legitimate technical tools, for example, Nirsoft apps, but if you routinely scan your system with another antivirus solution, you'll be aware that this is par for the course with competing for antivirus solutions.

The URL filtering is a useful feature, which is able to block most of the malicious URLs on our test. We also appreciate the custom configuration options, as while competing antivirus solutions only have the option for the user to toggle the URL blocking on or off, this one features a 'protection strength' slider, which can be turned up for more aggressive blocking, or reduced to lessen the false alarms.

Another useful feature is the Trend Micro's Folder Shield, a module for anti-ransomware, watching over the Documents and Pictures folders, along with any connected USB drives, providing protection from any attempts for modification of these files by trusted processes, with the option for adding more folders if needed. We get that Folder Shield is not really breaking any new ground, as Windows 10 has similar features with its new Controlled Folders, but we certainly welcome this extra layer of protection which has the potential to stop a brand new undiscovered ransomware right away.

Keep the Trend Micro security program updated 

Like any other software program, Trend micro security programs do update their definitions regularly. In case, your antivirus program is not up to date, you won’t be able to take advantage of the latest features of that security program stored in your computer. The older version of the Trendmicro program might not be able to detect or correct efficiently some newly generated virus or malware, at that time your files or data may get corrupted. Even the Trend Micro Exe file the antivirus program gets updated automatically whenever connected to the internet. So that means you just need to connect your device with a working internet connection and Trendmicro will update by itself.