Bye Bye, Trend Micro

I was already not planning to renew my Trend Micro, because it has never managed to complete a single scan, and can't tell me why (doesn't keep proper logs), and now I'm sure I'm never using Trend Micro again. Like McAfee, it has delivered spam it's supposed to be protecting me from.

USB, Autorun, and Trend Micro

I found that my Sandisk Cruzer Edge USB drive came with an autorun.inf file to run some Sandisk software. Bad, but I'll still continue using Sandisk products.

I tried to delete this and install the Panda vaccine (highly recommended), but got Access Denied problems, even using attrib -r -h -s autorun.inf in Command Prompt.

Luckily, I found this discussion: http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/154065-access-denied-autorun-inf.html which said "Apparently Trend Micro antivirus blocks the access to, creation of and modification of autorun.inf files on USB drives as well." I believe this is the relevant setting.

Disabling Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security allowed me to delete autorun.inf and vaccinate my USB drive. Although it's good to disable autorun on Trend Micro's part, the way they do this and not inform the user leads to some confusion.

Trend Micro Titanium Maximum Security

I bought Trend Micro's antivirus, thinking it seemed ok, but I'm finding more and more problems:

• Their products sound similar and confusing. The website says they have Titanium Maximum Security and Titanium Premium Security. Premium is more expensive, so I guess Maximum isn't maximum.
• There's no way to see the date of virus definitions. But they clearly show your subscription expiry date, which seems more important to them.
• There are no proper scan logs. A scan log should show time started, time completed, locations scanned, things found etc. The only "detailed log" shows everything separated into viruses, spyware, web threats etc. and is hard to navigate. I say this is important because I suspect my scans aren't completing, and proper logs would show this.
• There's a System Tune-up, but it doesn't tell you what it's going to do before it does it. Hope you like surprises!

Against automatic updates

I might just be paranoid, but I disable automatic updates whenever I can. Maybe it's a remnant from when there were dial-up connections and people made conscious decisions to go online. Automatic updates:

• Waste bandwidth - both speed and amount of data
• Reduce your computer's performance without warning
• May force you to restart, and not give you a choice
• For large updates like service packs, it's best to let people beta-test it first, and at least backup before you install them.
• May reduce functionality or introduce undesired features (ads)
• Give software unfettered access to your computer (spyware and rootkits)
• Have caused massive system outages in the past (McAfee 5958 in 2010)

I also find it suspicious why some companies are so enthusiastic about pushing updates, even non-essential ones, and MAKE DISABLING AUTOMATIC UPDATES SO HARD:

Google Software Update on OS X runs in the background, cannot be disabled easily without hindering Google software, and gives you no option to turn it off! You know, the same company once said "don't be evil" too!