TREND MICRO HOUSECALL REVIEW DRIVERS

Now forgive me if I'm being a little thick here, but surely it would be better for a product calling itself 'Maximum Security' if there were no options here at all and instead it just provided, well, the maximum protection.

TREND MICRO HOUSECALL REVIEW DRIVERS

These provide three options:Extra Performance for 'helping the operating system launch more quickly' by only loading the security software drivers after bootup.Д®xtra Security for the maximum protection by loading those drivers as soon as the computer starts, but at the expense of a much slower bootup time.Д«alanced Protection which loads some drivers early and 'reduces delays' in system startup. Now I say on the whole, as there is one area that it could be improved both in terms of speed as well as not confusing the user, and that's the rather bizarre 'System Startup Settings' which reside in the advanced configuration options. In my testing during the review period I found that, on the whole, it kept the 'Internet security that won't slow you down' promise. Trend Micro seems to have pulled this off with the Titanium Maximum Security 2011 product. Much better that your security solution does not become a problem, instead just works away in the background without impacting upon your usage at all. Think about it, if your security software adds too much in the way of resource usage overhead and slows down your day to day work what is likely to happen? Yep, the user is likely to disable the security software while doing some task or other, or even uninstall it completely.

Much better to let intelligent software make the decision for you and by so doing keep your system safe, than let you guess what the answer should be and either let the bad guys in or prevent your software from working properly.Д®qually importantly is the not so small matter if resource usage. This latter point being perhaps the most important, as security software that asks the user what it wants to do with some obscure process that wants permission to do something equally obscure does not good security make. No annoying prompts to interrupt whatever you are doing and confuse you in the process. Trend Micro, like most of the leading security software developers, has adopted this silent approach as the default and as such once Titanium Maximum Security is installed it doesn't get in your way during day to day computer usage.

Many years ago now I attended a technical workshop hosted by Symantec at its Santa Monica base, and a senior firewall architect at the time was enthusiastic about what he referred to as 'the silent firewall' which essentially would perform all the blocking and filtering functions required to keep your computer secure, but without all the annoying 'you wanna let this do that' type prompts that were commonplace at the time. There has definitely been a move in recent years to a less is more philosophy as far as the security software vendors are concerned, and that's most definitely a good thing. On our real world testing system the process took, including system restarts, a yawn-inducing 20 minutes from the get go to the got protected. Having checked for any conflicting software (such as Norton) or even traces of such software left behind by other security suite uninstallation routines (hello Norton again) and then removing them, the Trend installer goes and fetches the latest updates before eventually getting on with the application installation itself. Think less of speedy rocket-powered installations and more of slow and steady, with a certain degree of swimming through treacle wearing flippers thrown in. The likes of Norton these days make much fuss about just how quick installing a security suite is, but you can forget all claims of being done in 60 seconds when it comes to Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security.

Trend micro housecall review