Get essential protection
Protect your PC from viruses and spyware
Prevent unauthorized changes to your applications
Surf the web safely
Stop malicious downloads from websites
Find and block malicious links in emails or IMs
Block email and image spam
Windows firewall optimization
Authenticate wireless hotspots and WiFi networks
Protect your children online
Restrict Internet access by specific categories
Limit Internet access time and duration for children
Safely bank and shop online
Data theft prevention keeps your sensitive personal information, like credit card numbers and passwords safe
Securely erase files to US Government security standards
Remotely lock files in case of computer theft
Defend against advanced threats
Automatic warning against suspicious links in email and IM
Extend your security protection to smartphones
Maximize your PC performance
System tuner improves PC performance by cleaning up temporary files, registries, and the start-up manager
Cleans browser history, cookies and more to enhance performance
Backup & sync
Includes 10 GB of secure online backup with Sync and Sharing features
This is their all-inclusive product, which lists for $79.95 for 1 year of protection on up to 3 PC's. They also have versions with fewer features: Titanium Internet Security ($69.95 - 1 yr/3 PCs) and Titanium Antivirus+ ($39.95 - 1 yr/1 PC).
When I started to install the software it detected that I had another company's product already installed on the PC. It stated that the other (competitor's) product was incompatible and advised me to remove it. I said OK and it proceeded to remove the other product from the PC. Once that completed, I needed to reboot. Installation then took about half an hour on a PC running XP home with 1G of memory. Note that Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security 2011 requires 500MB of available disk space in order for the installation to run.
Once everything was complete, I noticed that the Antivirus portion of the product did not appear to have been turned on by default. That seemed a bit strange. I tried to turn it on. I am not sure if my actions eventually got it to turn on or if it was simply a delay in turning on by the software itself.
I also encountered the following:
When running a scan of the computer, it automatically flagged and deleted perfectly harmless cookies. Most cookies are not harmful. (See this article: Not All Cookies Are Bad.) Many cookies simply ensure, for example, that the place you are shopping at or that you linked from get the credit that they deserve. There are many websites that are solely funded by such information, and deleting and blocking such cookies robs many people of income they are entitled to. And even for technically knowledgeable and caring folks who would want to make sure such cookies were not deleted by telling such software not to do that, the Trend Micro product does not even provide such an option. Since a large majority of users would have no clue about this or that they were cheating legitimate businesses out of income because of this action, this is a serious overreach on the part of this vendor (and some others as well).
I contacted Trend Micro support via email regarding the above issue. Sadly, the initial response was in very poor English so it was difficult to figure out exactly what the response was. In essence, however, after several emails back and forth with Trend Micro support, I was essentially told that the product was smart enough to know a good cookie from a bad cookie (not true) and that after trying several times to make clear that (a) that was not true and in the meantime (b) I was looking for the option to tell the program to ignore cookies I knew to be safe, I finally was told they previously had such a feature but had removed it. The implication from at least one response was that I was wrong and the software could not possibly have deleted cookies that did no harm to the computer.
This product seems to have a variety of good and useful features and I may test some of them out and report back again on this product. I am, however, disappointed in the email support and the less than desirable approach regarding cookies.
Richard L. Kuper,
Editor
The Kuper Report
