Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus 2011

Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus Plus 2011 ($60 for 1 year, 3 PCs as of 12/15/2010) finished fifth in our roundup of 2011 antivirus products. It’s simple–some may say too simple–and easy to use, and it did a reasonably good job at blocking malware.

Installing Titanium Antivirus is a pretty straightforward affair: It requires you to click through only a couple screens before installation begins. But you’ll need an Internet connection when you install Titanium Antivirus–the installer has to download the software before it starts installing, which adds time to the process.

As for actually using Titanium Antivirus, well, saying it’s set-and-forget simple might be an understatement. When you first launch it, Titanium Antivirus touts its “Cloud” capabilities, and how you won’t have to download updates–it takes care of all that for you. The main interface is extremely straightforward: A big green checkmark indicates that you’re protected. There are only a few buttons–one for scanning, one for settings, and one for stats.

This super-simple approach isn’t for everyone–if you like flipping toggles and tweaking settings, Titanium Antivirus isn’t for you. If you can’t be bothered with adjusting settings, you’ll love Titanium Antivirus. The downside, though, is that Trend Micro’s documentation is rather scant and provides few specifics.

In terms of detection performance, Trend Micro put up very good scores, though not quite top-notch ones. It detected 98.4 percent of samples of recent known malware–a strong result. It also fully blocked 88 percent of brand new malware attacks, and partially blocked an additional 8 percent. This puts it above average, but not quite at the top of the leaderboard (the top performer in this test fully blocked 96 percent of new malware attacks).

Titanium Antivirus also proved to be effective at disinfecting PCs: It detected all infections on our test PC, removed all active components in 80 percent of the cases, and removed all traces of an infection 60 percent of the time.

Trend Micro had a low rate of false positives overall, but it was one of only two products we looked at to flag a good file as bad using its behavioral detection engine (which detects malware based on how it acts on your PC–a good way of stopping new, as-yet unknown malware).

Overall, Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus had a moderate impact on PC performance in our tests, finishing right around average for the products we looked at. Scan speeds were a mixed bag, though: it was one of the better performers in on-access scans which kick off when you open or save a file, but its on-demand scans–which you start manually–were a good bit slower than average. This is better than the reverse scenario where on-access speeds scans lag–those scans happen much more frequently–but it can still be frustrating to deal with.

That said, Trend Micro Titanium Antivirus Plus 2011 performed well in most of our tests, and is worth your consideration.