Trend Micro - Internet Security 2007

I've been using Trend Micro for a couple of years on a laptop. I hated the long downloads (about an hour/week on dialup for each update), but it worked and I didn't have time to look for another. Bad decision.

I do NOT recommend TM unless you have a broadband connection and don't use third-party spyware products.

Problems:
1. The download was 80MB - but TM didn't think that important enough to point it out when you're given a choice between a CD and a download.

2. The installation program took about 1 hour. First, of course, it had to unpack itself into a temporary directory. Then it discovered an existing copy of TM which had to be uninstalled. To do that completely required a reboot. The install program started up and found an incompatible spyware program. Choice: uninstall that or stop the TM install. Of course the uninstall required a reboot. TM's install program began again, and found another spyware program it wasn't compatible with. Same choices and another reboot. Would it have been so hard to program the installation SW to scan the computer BEFORE uninstalling the old version of TM - which ran just fine with those spyware programs - and listing all of the incompatible programs so one could make a decision before losing one's basic security program? Finally, the installation began but - yep, you guessed it: it took 15 mins. to complete and had to reboot the laptop again.

3. Fine, finally got the software installed and running. But the minute I got connected to the web, I got a flurry of warning messages with no information about what was upsetting it (no program name). If TM doesn't recognize the program - it provided no name at all - how on earth does it expect an ordinary user to recognize the program?

4. Then, to top it all off, this 3-month old program needed an update, currently downloading and scheduled to complete in 3.5 hours, on dialup. I had actually hoped that the long update downloads - taking an average of 1 hr./week - had been fixed in this latest version based on blurbs on the web site. Obviously, TM's definition of improvement is to triple the time required.

So, if you have a fast broadband connection and can live with TM's spyware capabilities, it will probably work fine for you. But next year, I'm switching to AVG and Zone Alarm for the laptop.