Online Virus Check
Written: Sep 05 '01
|
Product Rating:
|
|
|
Pros: Free, quick and easy to use
Cons: Hardly any, downloads of updates make take a while on slow lines
The Bottom Line: The service is free and brings the latest updates from anti-virus world to your PC.
|
|
|
| prostoalex's Full Review: TrendMicro HouseCall |
In September 2000 a research company IDC published the review of the anti-virus market. According the IDC data, 54% of the market belongs to Trend-Micro. The anti-virus industry has been going quite strong and perhaps thanks to the proliferation of corporate expenditures on the security software we have the free service called Trend-Micro HouseCall.
What is it?
HouseCall is an online anti-virus tool that can scan your hard drive while you are connected to the Internet. In fact, you can continue browsing the Web, leaving the application to work in another window. The first time you go to the site, they suggest you download their plug-in, and that might take some time, but later on the anti-virus check would start in a blink.
Why it is good for you
Number one reason – it’s free. Anti-virus software doesn’t cost that much to talk about huge savings, with the home packages from McAfee and Kaspersky being sold for about $50 a piece with a yearly or lifetime subscription. Nevertheless, if you don’t have the anti-virus tools on your PC, HouseCall might be a perfect choice for infrequent scans of your hard drive to determine whether you got any vires.
Number two reason – it’s self-updating. Remember how long it would usually take the regular software package to connect to the site, download the updates and the re-scan your hard drive? Well, with HouseCall all the updates are already on the server and thus any time you are running the application, you can be sure that all the latest patches were included.
Number three reason – not only it searches for vires, it cleans them. The AutoClean option when checked allows the anti-virus software to automatically clean up your files. However, that doesn’t always work, depending on the complexity of the virus, and sometimes you would need to take additional steps or delete infected files.
Other thoughts
In this modern age of post-dotcom crash it’s quite amazing that something so good can still be free. Perhaps it’s the health of the anti-virus market in general that allowed this service to provide unrestricted access to every user so far, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Trend-Micro would make a decision to make HouseCall a paid service in the near future. Furthermore, I think me personally and most of the people would agree to pay something like $5-20 a year for ability to run virus checks on our PCs.
Actual results
Being a careful surfer, I didn’t expect HouseCall to find any sick files on my machine, however, one time it did find the Matrix virus, which I wasn’t really happy about. The good thing about the Trend-Micro Web site is that when it finds the virus and cannot delete it (that was the case with MTX), it would provide you with additional information on how to get rid of the infection.
All I can say is that I highly recommend this service to any Internet user worried about security and virus protection.
Recommended:
Yes
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
prostoalex
|
|
Location: Mountain View, CA
Reviews written: 72
Trusted by: 27 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.