The best antivirus solution is the one that is as simple as possible. After all, if the user is unable to navigate the application to take advantage of its features, much of the program’s usefulness will be lost. Trend Micro’s maximum security reinforces this principle with some of the easiest navigation we’ve seen.
Note: This review is part of best anti-virus rounding. Go to that for details on the competing products and how we tested them.
The default dashboard is very simple. There’s a big one To scan the circle in the middle changes color based on the PC’s state. Clicking on the circle initiates a quick scan, while clicking the down arrow to the right offers a quick, full, and custom scan selection.
IDGMain dashboard for Trend Micro Maximum Security.
Above that circle are four basic categories of app security: Device, Private, Dataand family.
Devices tab
The Device tab includes settings for Trend Micro’s real-time web scanning and filtering. There’s also a PC Health Checker option to help optimize system performance. If you use this feature, the app will rate your current optimization level and let you choose to “make improvements”. These tweaks include fixing vulnerabilities to regain disk space.
Next in this section of the app is Mute Mode, which is a really great feature in terms of the typical gaming mode feature. By default, Mute Mode activates when the PC goes full screen. However, you can disable this feature if you want to activate it manually.
IDGMaximum Security Mute Mode.
While running, Mute Mode will stop “unimportant” messages from interrupting you; It can also disable Windows Update and automatically terminate programs. There’s also a setting to turn off Mute Mode after a specified amount of time.
Mute mode is great for gamers who want to turn off their backup program or other applications when it’s time to play.
Privacy tab
The Private The tab has features designed to keep sensitive data from leaving your PC, though a few are less useful. The Privacy Scanner option is supposed to automatically scan social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to optimize your privacy settings. It should also scan your web browsers to make sure they are as private as possible. However, in our tests we only saw options to do this with Internet Explorer, which wasn’t a pretty interface in the age of Windows 10. Chrome’s support was limited to a non-existent toolbar instead of an add-on. This feature should be removed or reworked significantly.
IDGMaximum Security’s Privacy tab.
Trend Micro also added a new feature called Pay Guard, which opens a secure sandbox browser in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer, but doesn’t support Edge. You can always know when Pay Guard is active, as the browser window will have a solid border to indicate it is a secure session. Trend Micro recommends that you only use this feature for online shopping and banking, not for regular web browsing.
Finally, Prevent Data Theft follow Private Allows you to enter specific information such as credit card numbers, email addresses or phone numbers that you want to be protected. If Trend Micro sees this data entered into a website, email or instant message, it will warn you that the data is leaving your PC. Trend Micro also says you don’t need to enter the entire number either. Just seven numbers in a row is enough to track your credit card.
IDGData protection of Maximum Security in performance.
In our brief tests, Maximum Security could prevent credit card numbers from escaping in Gmail messages, but nothing did with Slack.
Trend Micro told us in 2018 that Data Theft Prevention doesn’t support the web socket protocol, which is why Slack is able to send data.
Data tab
The Data is an important part of Trend Micro’s security features. Folder Shield protects specific folders against ransomware and you can specify as many or as few folders as you want. Secure Erase removes sensitive data, while Password Manager is a browser-based password manager for storing passwords, form filling data, and secure notes. Vault allows you to encrypt sensitive data.
Family tab
IDGData Tab of Maximum Security.
final family The tab lets you use Trend Micro’s parental controls over device restrictions, such as web page restrictions or computer time limits.
Those are the main features. The Trend Micro also has a setting that’s accessible via the side gear To scan on the main control panel. Here you can adjust options for scanning and checking PC Health. There’s also an exception list to prevent Trend Micro from monitoring certain files or folders, and options for whitelisting trusted websites and Wi-Fi networks.
Back to the dashboard, next to the settings option is a button that shows security report which shows all found or blocked threats, Latest PC Health Check result, control summary of parent and security summary of your browser password.
Valuation
Trend Micro Maximum Security has a introductory price of $ 40 for up to five devices in a year – the MSRP after the demo period is $ 90. If you need to include 10 devices, the price is still $ 40 for the first year and $ 100 after that. Overall, this subscription price is on par with many other major antivirus suites.
Efficiency
Look at AV-Test March and April 2020 results, Trend Micro Internet Security (lower-level suite with the same security tool) hit 100% in January and February in the 0-day web / email threats test with 304 samples. It also achieved 100% in both months on the popular and popular malware test with over 20,000 samples.
AV-Comparatives has similar results. Trend Micro blocked 100% of the 372 in-pattern threats February and March 2020 test protection in real world with 16 times false positives. Trend Micro also scored 99.2% in AV-Comparatives’ Malware protection testing March 2020 with a false positive and 0.8 percent compromised against more than 10,000 malware samples. That percent of compromise is actually the worst performing score on the March 2020 test. Trend Micro’s offline detection rate is also low at 52.3%. When online, Trend Micro’s capabilities are solid, but when offline it needs some work based on AV-Comparatives’ tests.
IDGMaximum security with active optimization.
SE Labs also reviewed Trend Micro and rated the company’s protection as AAA with a total accuracy percentage of 98%, behind Symantec, Avira, Windows Defender, Sophos, ESET and Kaspersky.
For our internal tests, the performance in PCMark 10’s Expansion benchmark was 1,638 with Trend Micro installed, compared to 1,660 without. That’s a pretty big drop, with the main difference being in the digital and game content creation section. Productivity scores drop a bit too, especially when working with spreadsheets.
Large file transfer times were also nearly 30 seconds slower when Trend Micro was running, and surprisingly slower storage times of 1 minute and almost 15 seconds. At first we thought this might be because we went ahead and stored it in a supervised directory for the ransomware. However, going out of those directories, shows a similar result. Archiving is also slightly slower around 40 seconds, and the Manual Brake test is about 11 minutes slower.
The bottom line in our tests was that mid-range and entry-level PCs can see a significant performance impact when installing Trend Micro.
Conclusion
The Trend Micro’s pricing is good and its protection mainly scores the highest from three different test outfits. Trend Micro uses a variety of layers of protection including routine scanning, behavioral analysis, and artificial intelligence.
While its protection is good against malware and zero-day threats, data protection takes a bit of work. It bypassed activity inside a famous desktop program, allowing me to send protected data on purpose. Social network security also needs to be improved or removed.
However, the price is right for Maximum Security, and its subscription is consistent with what many other top security companies are charging. Very beneficial it is the way the interface is simple to understand and navigate.
Overall, Trend Micro Maximum Security is good security software. We had no problem paying for it for the first year price, but at MSRP, there are much better options.
Editor’s note: Since online services are often repetitive, gaining new features, and improving performance over time, this rating may change to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to our text or final review judgment will be noted at the beginning of this article.