I for the past 2 years have used Trend Micro PC-cillian as my antivirus and spyware protection software. I until recently have been relatively happy with the software. It had always worked and “touch wood” I have not had any viruses.

I was looking to renew my subscription to Trend at the end of this year (when it runs out) and carry on using this product; however I have recently faced some problems. When I took out the subscription I paid for 2 years of protection (it was £5 more than 1 year). That was fine until I rebuilt my desktop machine after Christmas this year (half way through the 2 year subscription). When I reinstalled Trend it said “Your subscription will expire on the 29th of January” then asked me to renew. Needless to say, I contacted technical support who after a few days managed to sort the issue and it started reporting the proper date of expiry.

Then more fool me I decided to try to update to the 2008 version of the software (a free entitlement with my subscription), the install went fine, the software ran fine, until it tried to update the virus definitions upon which it crashed. More emails to technical support, and we (myself and Mark the tech support man) came to the conclusion that downgrading to 2007 which worked ok for me was the way forward…. er…. backward.

So for a while it was working as I would expect, until I had to rebuild my PC again and surprise surprise after installing Trend again it reported that my subscription had run out in January. Again I emailed tech support except this time I got an email telling me to delete the registry entry that holds the product key and then re-enter the key into the software. I did this and the same problem occurred. I emailed the results back to the lady from Trend and since then (6 days ago) I have not heard from her. So as a result I have now uninstalled PC-cillian and put a 30 day trial of NOD32 on my PC which, according to reviews works pretty well. My subscription to Trend will not go wasted though as it works fine on my XP based laptop (the subscription covers 3 computers) so I will continue to use it on that, just not my desktop machine. I will however not be renewing my subscription for my laptop when the time comes. If NOD32 works on here then my laptop will be getting the proverbial “NOD” from me.

Have you had bad experiences with Trend Micro? Let me know, contact details in the sidebar!

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p.s Apologies for not blogging in the past two weeks, lifes been really hectic and looks to continue that way (though I will have more time to write posts). I have a HUGE list of things to write about!!!